


SEROTINE

by celestialmechanics



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: (yearning increases), Friends to Lovers, Gen, Insecure Miya Atsumu, Introspection, Introspective Miya Atsumu, M/M, Pining, Pining Miya Atsumu, Post-Time Skip, Pro Volleyball Player Miya Atsumu, allusions to Greta Thunberg, but spoiler: hand fixation, gratuitous explanations of sustainable agriculture, he's trying!, i SAID bi atsumu rights, i couldn't resist clowning ushiwaka again im sorry, multiple references to Mitski, take a shot every time i refer to kita's hands as steady, this will get spicy later, yes atsumu is reading the lorax
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:29:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27441211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialmechanics/pseuds/celestialmechanics
Summary: serotine(adj): late in occurring, developing, or flowering.Atsumu tries to recover from a broken heart by spending the summer working on Kita's rice farm, and everything gets worse before it gets better.
Relationships: Akaashi Keiji/Miya Osamu, Bokuto Koutarou/Ojiro Aran, Kita Shinsuke/Miya Atsumu, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Sakusa Kiyoomi/Ushijima Wakatoshi, past Miya Atsumu/Original Female Character
Comments: 29
Kudos: 110





	1. late spring

**Author's Note:**

> lessons in selflessness, selfishness, and cowardice from one (1) Miya Atsumu

_nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals_

_the power of your intense fragility:whose texture_

_compels me with the colour of its countries,_

_rendering death and forever with each breathing_

_[somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond] e.e. cummings_

  
  


[april]

The receding rays of sunlight hide behind the sloping hillsides that gradually rise higher until they've transformed into mountain peaks. Atsumu dares to briefly raise his eyes from the winding road in front of him, glancing up towards the treetops, where the leaves are dancing in the wind and gleaming in the golden sunset—and it's while he's driving across this stretch of deserted highway in dwindling daylight that he realizes this might not be Osamu's worst idea ever (though, it's worth noting that Osamu has had some truly awful ideas over the years, so maybe he's not paying him much of a compliment).

In her sickly-sweet robotic voice, the GPS informs Atsumu that he'll need to make a left turn in 1000 meters. Despite the incessant and erratic drumming of Atsumu's fingers upon the leather steering wheel, he finds that he feels relaxed for the first time in days, or maybe even weeks. He hasn't visited the countryside in years—he's always so busy with volleyball, and the only times he finds an opportunity to get away from Osaka are the holidays when he can visit his parents' home just outside of Kobe. He slows as the GPS pings, indicating that he's approaching the spot where he needs to take his turn. His car battles against the growing incline of the mountainous road—and despite the loneliness he's felt suffocating the car throughout this entire road trip, he's actually glad that he's alone, pleased that there's no one in the passenger seat white-knuckling the handle on the car's ceiling. His car heaves once as it overcomes the steep terrain, and Atsumu exhales in relief. The sun sinks below the horizon in his rearview mirror; maybe this won't be so bad, after all. 

But, he'd be remiss if he were to concede all of the credit to Osamu for devising this potentially decent plan. Here's the summary:

* * *

He hears the telltale rattle of a key unlocking his front door from where he lies, borderline catatonic, in his bedroom. Atsumu begrudgingly opens his red-rimmed and swollen eyes—and then immediately shuts them once again, because he knows of only two— _actually, one,_ he reminds himself, painfully— _one_ other person who would invite themself into Atsumu's apartment unannounced. He opens his eyes again, and braces for impact in the split-second he has before his bedroom door flies open, revealing the pissed-off reflection of his own face. 

Osamu looks ready to deal Atsumu a fatal blow—probably for ignoring every single one of Osamu's texts and phone calls, which Atsumu likely deserves—but stops his barrage of admonishments before it even begins at the sight of his haggard brother. "Yikes. You look like shit, 'Tsumu."

Atsumu burrows further into his stinking stale sheets, barely able to muster the energy needed to throw a weak-willed middle-finger towards Osamu in retaliation and murmur, "Same face as you, asshole." He's only just closed his eyes once again when his sheets and comforter are ripped away from him. With a distressed groan, he scrubs at the built-up crust and grime of dried-up tears from his eyes and finds that he has just enough willpower to sit up. His vision blurs with the familiar sunspots of a headrush. "The fuck do you want?"

When his vision stops swimming, he finds Osamu's face contorted in disgust—whether that disgust is directed towards the Dorito dust and Oreo crumbs hibernating in the crevices of Atsumu's blankets, the smell of Atsumu's dirty sheets, or the state of Atsumu himself, he couldn't say—and he drops the squalid mass of bedding to the floor, wiping a hand across the fabric of his jeans as though to wash away the filth (or perhaps to wipe away the sadness—both were quite prevalent in the essence of those sheets, Atsumu thinks). "Just came over to check on you, jackass," he says, though not unkindly. He gingerly settles on the edge of the bed, creating as much distance between himself and Atsumu as possible. "How are you holding up?"

Atsumu pins him with a withering glare that asks: _how the hell do you think?_ and gestures to himself and his immediate surroundings, all of which are generally in bad shape: his greasy and unwashed hair, limp and lacking luster; his stale shirt with days-old armpit sweat stains, the putrid odor infiltrating Osamu's nostrils despite his distance; the dark circles that reside under his puffy, red eyes; the trashcan next to his bed, filled with snot-stained tissues and crinkly plastic candy wrappers; and the empty container of Double Stuf Oreos that slumber on the pillow beside his.

Osamu smiles sympathetically and points a finger at the emptied Oreo package on the pillow: "Honestly, Tsumu, I think that's an improvement from what you had in your bed before." Instead of scornful laughter, or a pillow colliding with his face, he's confronted with an uncomfortable silence—and Atsumu's eyes grow shiny with the beginnings of teardrops. 

The panic sets in, and it sets in rapidly: Osamu isn't well-acquainted being on this side of a post-breakup fallout (if that wasn't already obvious). Usually, it's Atsumu sitting awkwardly at the edge of the bed while Osamu makes bedfellows out of tissues and chip crumbs; usually, it's Atsumu comforting Osamu in his failed encounters in love, because he falls in love and he falls in love hard, with ease and airy laughter and little foresight. Atsumu, on the other hand, rarely grants himself permission to fall in love, seldom allows himself to arrive at the point of no return—but when he does fall in love, he falls hard. Osamu waves his hands frantically in an attempt to placate Atsumu, whose lip has begun to wobble dangerously: "Sorry, sorry, bad joke!"

Atsumu sniffles pathetically and rubs his eyes to discourage the unshed tears from making their presence known. "No, it was funny; I just don't think I can laugh quite yet." His eyes fall towards his hands, and Osamu follows his gaze to see him fidgeting with the small velvet box, the pad of his thumb swiping across the lid to create alternating stripes of velvety midnight blue. Osamu exhales a slight sigh and holds out his hand expectantly. Atsumu's knuckles turn white for a moment as his fist tightens, his reluctance to let go of the box and the broken promises it holds within unspoken but fully evident: but his grip eventually relaxes enough to place it gently in Osamu's waiting palm. 

Osamu rises and places the box in his pocket for safekeeping, deciding he'll hold onto it until the sight of it no longer makes his brother's stomach twist itself into knots. "I know, 'Tsumu." Wanting to dissolve the tension in the air, he holds out a hand for Atsumu to grab, pulls him up and out of bed, and shoves him towards the bathroom door. "Now go get showered and make yourself look like a functional person, again. We're going to eat."

Atsumu brightens marginally—he hasn't eaten real food in what feels like days: "You brought food?"

* * *

Osamu did not, in fact, bring food. Instead, he hauls Atsumu off of his sorry ass, forces him to look (and smell) presentable, and makes him drive the two of them to Onigiri Miya to experience Atsumu's custom-designed hell.

"Miya-san, are you positive that he _actually_ took a shower?"

"Yes, Sakusa-kun, I'm positive he took a shower."

"It doesn't seem like he did; he looks like shit." Sakusa, ever the drama queen, sniffs the air twice and narrows his eyes: "smells like shit, too."

Atsumu lifts his head from where it had laid upon the bar, and, choosing to fully surrender himself to an evening of torture, turns to glare at Sakusa, who is seated two barstools away. "I'm sitting right here. I can hear every word you're saying. You're aware of this, yes?"

Sakusa lifts his plastic straw to his lips, tilting his head and squinting his eyes as though he's in deep contemplation about how he'll answer. With a thoughtful hum, he declares, "Yes, I'm aware of this, Miya." Despite his attempt at their usual banter, his words aren't tinged with malice, like they ordinarily are when the two of them exchange barbs: instead, the words are softened by something like pity in his eyes, his mouth turned into a half-grimace instead of a scathing scowl—and Atsumu hates it, so he looks away. 

He faces Osamu, who is stationed behind the bar, his hands caked in grains of rice, and his eyes alight with the joy he derives from preparing the food for their little early dinner party—the little early dinner party that Atsumu absolutely did not agree to attend. "Why am I here?" he asks through gritted teeth.

Osamu opens his mouth to answer but is interrupted by two arms winding themselves gracefully around his waist and a chin gently placing itself atop his shoulder. Osamu turns his head to the side and gives Keiji a lazy half-smile, placing a chaste kiss to his lips. Atsumu suppresses the disgusted look on his face just as Keiji turns his slate green eyes onto him—eyes filled not with pity but with understanding—and Atsumu, miraculously, manages to look directly into them without flinching. "You're here because your friends are worried about you and want to see you."

Atsumu groans in defeat, his forehead returning to the slick wooden surface of the bar. _Damn you, Keiji,_ he thinks, as grateful for his brother-in-law's genuine kindness as he is resentful of it. He doesn't want to be here right now—he'd prefer to be crawling out of his bed, his forearms and back marred with indentations from Dorito crumbs, peeling himself from the squalid and dirtied sheets to meander into his dark, empty, too-big-for-one-person kitchen. He'd find a bowl shoved into the very back of the cabinet, one that he thinks she'd never eaten out of when she'd lived here, and fix himself a bowl of Captain Crunch for dinner (again). He'd sit at his kitchen table and stare at the empty seat across from him before caving in and staring at the box—

_The box._ He anxiously palms the pockets of his jeans, expecting to feel the velvet box that's been haunting him for weeks—but then remembers that it's tucked safely away in Osamu's pocket instead of continuing to burn a hole in his. His fingers extend and curl, fingernails etching scarlet impressions in the shape of crescent moons into the rough skin of his palm, the motion simultaneously mindless and purposeful, and he almost laughs at the absurdity: how he masochistically finds comfort in the very object that haunts his every waking moment, his every turbulent dream.

He likes to think that it might not have hurt so bad had he seen it coming; if he'd had even the slightest bit of foresight: but Atsumu's always had tunnel vision in regards to the things he loves, the things he places on mile-high pedestals that he can only dream of reaching. He has a penchant for hyper fixation, a nasty habit of becoming so committed to the big picture that he can't see the cracks forming beneath the pressure of his infatuation. He'd bought the ring in January, about halfway through his fifth season with the Black Jackals, and had planned on proposing to Hana when the season ended in April. Devotion has never been a simple concept for Atsumu: he doesn't fall in love so much as he purposefully steps into it, each stride towards the bliss of belonging to someone plotted on a map as if he's an archaeologist adventuring into an ancient booby-trapped hideaway. But with Hana, once he'd been sure that she was someone worth loving—that she'd understand how to love him back—he'd taken the leap, tossing the map aside and running, sprinting ahead and falling into the pit with reckless abandon. 

Or maybe he hadn't done that, based on what Hana had said on the matter: because a week ago—two days before he'd planned on winning the V. League regular-season championship with his teammates and then turning to face Hana as she rushed the court with the other fans, grabbing her face and kissing her with every last ounce of slap-happy adoration, and dropping to one knee, taking the nose-dive, plummeting into the canyon's depths: she'd broken things off. Atsumu doesn't remember much of what she'd said, his brain too addled with television static, as if she'd been speaking from underwater—but it was something along the lines of _you never let me in,_ and _I'm never going to be a priority, I'm more like a safety net,_ and _of course, I love you, I do, I do, but isn't it better for both of us if we call it off now?_

Atsumu didn't understand then, and he doesn't understand now, and the lightness of his pockets, the absence of a fistful of glass shards, threatens to drive him mad before the night is through. He flexes his fingers and curls them back into his palm, again and again, almost succumbing to the urge to ask Osamu to give him back the velvet box, even if just for a moment—but then the door opens, and the rest of the intervention squad arrives. 

They're all gentle with him, at least at first. Bokuto wears his heart on his sleeve and therefore can't help but wear his condolences on his face; Suna tries his best to look apathetic, but Atsumu can see the sadness that resides just beneath his stony exterior; Aran is almost as bad as Bokuto, his eyes big and shiny, his mouth curled into a frown: but Atsumu levels them all with a fiery gaze (because pity is far worse than candor), and they all lose the puppy dog eyes. 

And 20 minutes later, Atsumu thinks that perhaps demanding they all forgo the pity party had been a mistake because his glass rattles from the force of Bokuto's hands smacking against the table they're all seated at. Atsumu wraps his hand around the cup to keep it from spilling and looks up to confront the finger pointing directly between his eyes (He shouldn't be surprised: Bokuto always was a close talker). "You need to snap out of it, TsumTsum! It's okay to be sad, but you can't self-destruct like this!"

If anyone else had said this to him, Atsumu is sure he would've been offended by the words and would have responded with something twice as biting: but since it's Bokuto, he knows that he means well, that the words only come from the kindest place possible. Still, he doesn't grace Bokuto with an answer, opting instead to lift his onigiri to his mouth and tear off a bite with his teeth, chewing it slowly—and it's _so_ much better than Captain Crunch, though he'd never say that aloud. When it's clear to him that no one at the table will grant him the gift of changing the subject, he swallows his food and sighs. "It's not that easy, Bokkun."

Bokuto looks prepared to launch into another tirade, but Aran spares Atsumu by placing a hand over Bokuto's wrist and raising a single eyebrow. Atsumu is briefly thankful that his godlike intuition led him to introduce the two as Bokuto grumbles and brings his beer to his lips, quelled by his partner's meaningful look. Atsumu tries to convey his gratefulness to Aran but stops short at his sharp expression, and the loud way he clears his throat, demanding his companions' attention. 

"You need to get out of town. If you stay here, you're gonna let yourself wither away in that apartment, all by yourself, without letting any of us help you." _How typical_ , Atsumu thinks, that Aran's interruption of Bokuto hadn't been for Atsumu's sake, but rather for Aran to steal the spotlight to deliver a pep talk of his own. He sits adjacent to Aran, and Atsumu can feel the weight of his gaze from here. He lifts his eyes to meet Aran's: and because he senses no pity, Atsumu forces himself to maintain eye contact. 

"Where do you recommend I go, Aran? You got a vacation home you've been hiding from us?"

Osamu chooses that moment to return from the storeroom in the restaurant's rear with a familiar duffel bag draped over one shoulder. Osamu lobs the surprisingly heavy bag onto Atsumu's lap while he's still attempting to process the series of events that brought him here, and Atsumu suddenly realizes it's _his_ bag, one he'd believed to still be in his apartment. "Wh—?"

"I packed it for you while you were in the shower. It's got tons of your clothes, and all of your dumb little hair products, all that shit. Should last you a couple of months." He walks back over to his chair, settling into it and catching Keiji's hand in his own instinctively, his thumb stroking the golden band adorning Keiji's third finger like muscle memory. 

Atsumu looks between the duffel bag in his lap and his friends. His mind is still a bit sluggish, underused but still exhausted from days that cycled between staring blankly at his wall and crying his eyes out, so he's processing everything far too slowly to form a coherent thought. "Where—?"

Right then, his phone buzzes against the table, lighting up with a message from Aran: the combination of letters and numbers form an address for somewhere in Hyogo, but not one that Atsumu recognizes. He looks back up to see Aran sliding his phone back into his pocket. "You're going to spend some time with Kita at his rice farm." Atsumu automatically opens his mouth to protest, but Aran holds up a hand to stop him. "He's already agreed to help with off-season volleyball practice, and it's not that far of a drive from his place to Osaka if you need to come back for some reason. But you can't stay in that apartment of yours—it'd be good to get away from everything for a while, don't you think?"

"Besides," Suna interjects, his chair leaned back on its hind legs with hands linked behind his head and a mischievous glint in his eyes, "Kita-san's excited for you to visit. Can't go disappointing everyone's favorite upper-classman, now can we?"

Aran grumbles something about how he'd been under the impression that he was everyone's favorite upper-classman. Atsumu turns back to face Osamu, who just shrugs. "Don't really wanna see you moping around here anymore. And I've heard that nothing cures heartbreak quite like good old fashioned hard labor."

* * *

He bid farewell to the familiar city skyline hours ago, his car now trudging through small towns and hillside farms as the sun races across the sky and curtseys into the valleys between mountain peaks. He's grateful, in a way, that his friends had taken the initiative in the matter and had forced him to take some time away from the city that's so entangled with fresh and painful memories. Had Atsumu been able to determine for himself whether or not he would actually go, he's confident he wouldn't have followed through: he'd have gone back home fully intending to pack his duffel bag, but would have stopped short at the sight of the vacant bed, the missing dishware, the too-big-for-one-person kitchen: and the spiral would have started all over again. 

Instead, he's shoved behind the wheel of his own car while Aran types in the address for Kita's farm in Atsumu's phone's GPS. As he takes his phone back from Aran, he receives a text message from Shouyou with a Spotify playlist attached ("For Atsumu-san's coming-of-age movie road trip!"), and he kind of wants to cry again, but for different reasons than from before. He convinces the tears not to escape from the corners of his eyes just as Keiji appears by the driver's side window, handing him a sports drink and a pouch of sour candy with a wry smile. "You'll let us know when you get there?"

"Of course, I will."

Osamu walks up behind his husband and crams his hands into Keiji's back pockets for the sole purpose of grossing Atsumu out (which it does, of course). "Don't be a pain-in-the-ass for Kita-san to handle, 'Tsumu. He's doing all of us a big favor by taking you in for the summer, you understand?"

Atsumu sticks his arm through the open window to flick his twin on the forehead. "Don't be such a dick all the time, 'Samu."

Keiji kisses the sore spot on Osamu's forehead while Osamu smirks at his brother, not unkindly—and Atsumu almost misses the usual mean-spirited curl of his brother's mouth, the one that's been vacant from his face in the days since Atsumu had his heart torn from his chest. And Atsumu doesn't believe in twin telepathy, but Osamu is apparently a mind reader based on the way he rolls his eyes and lets his smile grow sharp around the edges: "Yeah, whatever, I love you too, dipshit."

One by one, Atsumu says goodbye to his friends. Bokuto somehow fits his massive arms and broad shoulders through the window to wrap Atsumu in a hug, and asks him to send lots and lots of pictures to the team group chat; Suna surprises Atsumu with a hug as well, but then informs him that the hug is actually intended for Kita, so Atsumu will need to pass it along; Sakusa stuffs four bottles of hand sanitizer in the bottom of Atsumu's duffel bag when he thinks no one is looking and flips Atsumu off when he realizes he'd seen him. Aran is the last to approach the driver's side window; he levels Atsumu with an oddly severe look in his eyes. Then, slowly, as if he's chosen his words carefully, precisely, he says, "maybe something good can come out of this. Try and make the most of it." Atsumu doesn't really know what he means, but he nods his head anyways and envelops his friend in one final hug.

And before he can second guess what exactly it is that he's doing, he succumbs to gut instinct and puts the car in drive. He follows the GPS's melodious voice all the way out of Osaka's never-ending rows of traffic, through Tamba, to Asago—and it's not until he reaches the quaint snow-melted valleys of Yabu that his nerves flare to life once again, and he feels as if he's stepped backward off of the diving board with his eyes closed and is plummeting not towards chlorinated waters but toxic waste. Atsumu has been told many times that he comes across as brash and impulsive, but the people who know Atsumu best would say that spontaneity is not in his nature. He likes to examine the terrain long and hard before he dares traverse it; he wants to survey the waters before testing the currents himself. His friends had assured him that Kita was okay with Atusumu's unplanned visit, even excited for it—but as his car's engine protests the ever-increasing gradient of the landscape, he's already feeling like a burden on his former captain's shoulders 

He's well and truly leaning over the precipice of panic as he rounds the driveway's final bend that leads him to Kita's farm just outside of Toyooka. The sunset sky has since faded into the indigo ombre of early evening, a few stars' distant lights permeating through the mellow haze of the night sky. _It's just Kita, it's just Kita,_ he recites in his mind over and over again. _You're not a burden, you're not a burden_ , thrumming through his veins and pulsating in time with his breaths. His headlights reflect off of the smooth and tranquil waters of the rice paddy fields; the sweat of his palms coat the steering wheel; finally, the small house where Kita lives and works out of comes into view. Atsumu's car rolls up the driveway slowly, and his car groans in relief when he finally eases the gear shift into 'park' and removes the keys from the ignition. His ribcage rattles around a trembling exhale: It's just Kita. Steeling himself, he opens the car door and hauls the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulder. 

As he's approaching the front door with his fist poised to knock, the porch light flickers to life. The door swings open, and Atsumu almost raps his knuckles directly against Kita's nose—but thankfully, his hand freezes just centimeters away from Kita's wide eyes, his gaze flitting from Atsumu's fist to his eyes. "Well," he says, a ghost of a smile gracing his lips, "that's sort of an unorthodox way to greet your friend."

* * *

The first thing he notices is that the house _feels_ like Kita: it's small and simplistic yet intriguing, imposing but not physically overpowering. The walls are plastered with wallpaper that reminds Atsumu of something straight out of the 80s', the hall lined with scarce adornments: a photo of Kita and his grandmother on his graduation day in a simple white frame; a gold-trimmed vintage mirror, the glass free of smudges; a rusted copper hook with nothing hanging from it. The one hallway leads straight through the house, one side spilling over into a kitchen and living room area, the other side of the house occupied by two bedrooms and one single bathroom. The living room furniture is sparse, but the few pieces Atsumu can see look well-loved and sturdy: one faded leather couch, its cushions overused and soft; a velvety beige loveseat nestled in front of the door leading to the back porch; a small, uncovered kotatsu as the centerpiece of the room. 

In the kitchen is an island counter made from polished granite with three bar stools shoved beneath it: the only things present on the kitchen counters are essential appliances (a French press and a toaster); everything else must be hidden away in cabinets and tucked into drawers. The only other visible thing is the whistling tea kettle atop the stove. Kita gestures for Atsumu to sit at one of the barstools while he prepares their tea, and in no time, they're both seated at the island and exchanging the stilted pleasantries that are mandatory for the first few moments of any conversation between adults: the weather, their work, their families. When they finally move away from polite small talk, Atsumu tries not to exhale a sigh of relief at the fact that Kita doesn't pry for details concerning his recent failed relationship. 

The steam rising from the mug of green tea he holds in front of his face threatens to coax his lethargy into exhaustion, and he's not lucky enough for this sudden weariness to escape Kita's notice. "If you'd like, we can go over everything in the morning. I'm sure you're tired from the drive over."

Atsumu fights to make his eyes appear awake and alert. "Nah, that's alright, Kita-san. I'm not even tired," he lies through a barely smothered yawn. 

Kita's eyes narrow slightly as he observes Atsumu, obviously not believing him—but ultimately, he lets him get away with the white lie. "Alright, whatever you say." Kita brings his own mug to his lips, blowing softly on the scalding liquid before taking a cautious sip. "So. What do you know about rice farming?"

"Uh… nothing." He scratches the back of his neck, oddly timid about his inexperience. "I would've done a little bit of research before showing up here, but I didn't exactly have time to prepare, you know?"

Kita laughs, and it sounds like bells—light, airy, and twinkling—, just as it did in high school. "You would've done your research? What kind of research is that, Atsumu?"

Atsumu gestures vaguely, his cheeks reddening with the heat of embarrassment. "You know—I mean, I could've read a book about rice or something, I don't know!"

Kita's laughter quiets down, but his smile remains on his face as he shakes his head fondly. "Don't worry; I wasn't expecting you to know everything. It's not like I'm gonna give you a pop quiz or anything like that."

And so, Kita explains: 

He's in charge of all operations on this rice farm, but he does have two other sets of hands helping out this summer, and Atsumu will have the chance to meet them tomorrow morning. The farm primarily focuses on growing a variety of rice called Koshihikari, but they also produce a handful of other summertime crops like sweet potatoes and squash (for 'biodiversity' and 'to help keep the soil healthy and productive,' or something like that). The farmers' main job in the summer is to maintain the water levels in the rice paddies, cultivate their other summer crops, and help the local fauna that occupies the rice paddies thrive within their ecosystem. 

Atsumu asks about the last point with the fauna: "I run an entirely organic operation here," Kita pauses to sip at his now-tepid tea. "The government gives me a stipend for farming using sustainable practices to try and replenish some of the depleted resources and help take care of the nature around this region. Sustainable farming has really done a lot to help some of the wildlife here—mainly the storks. But I think I'd try and do it this way even without the stipend."

"Storks?"

Kita nods. "Storks. They used to exist all throughout Japan, but they went extinct here sometime in the 1970s. Some scientists and activists in Toyooka have set up a research facility since then, and they used the few storks they could find to breed them in captivity. Now, they're trying to reintroduce them to the wild."

Atsumu nods, expecting Kita to continue. "Alright, what's that got to do with rice farms?"

"Well, unsustainable rice farming helped drive the storks to near-extinction in the first place. But on this farm, we don't use pesticides, and we do things a little differently with the water levels, the aquaculture, and aquatic fauna…" As Kita continues explaining all of the ways his farm is contributing to the restoration of the environment and wildlife, Atsumu smiles at how proud his friend looks of his work, how happy he seems about something as pure as taking care of a handful of endangered birds. A hand waves in front of his eyes, and he realizes that he'd zoned out during the latter half of Kita's explanation. "What was that you said earlier? 'I'm not tired at all' or something like that?"

"Shit, sorry."

Kita smiles, a small and private thing, and shakes his head. "It's alright. I'm not under the assumption that sustainable rice agriculture is the most stimulating of topics. Anyways, you probably don't have to worry about the details too much." Kita rises from his chair and gestures for Atsumu to follow him further down the hall. Atsumu follows diligently, taking in the stark decor of the living room and hallway as he passes through: a warm lamp on an otherwise vacant table, a tall wooden bookshelf filled with row after row of books and journals, and—

He freezes to stare at the lone framed photo hanging on the wall, his strides no longer thudding behind Kita's soundless footfalls. Kita also stops at the sudden absence of Atsumu behind him and turns to face him, eyebrows raised in question. Atsumu points a finger towards the photo: "You still have it."

A quizzical look crosses Kita's face as he crosses the short distance between himself and his former teammate. "Of course, I still have it. I'm the one who wanted the picture taken after all, aren't I?" He stops next to Atsumu and admires the photo as well. It's a team photo that they'd taken at the tail-end of Kita's third year, and it is, objectively, a horrendous picture: Atsumu and Osamu are barely-there blurs marring the photo's landscape, too concerned with trying to claw one another's eyes out to even fake civility long enough to smile. Between them is Aran, transformed into a bleary smudge, as he tries and fails to keep the twins separated. The rest of their teammates loiter around the peripheral, some giving the camera lens a confused half-attempt at a smile, others forgoing the pretense, and staring at the chaos with unabashed judgment. And in the center foreground of the photo is Kita, wearing a soft and genuine smile on his face—like there's nowhere else in the world he'd rather be at that moment. A feather-light touch grazes against his elbow and pulls Atsumu back into the present; Kita raises an eyebrow in response to Atsumu's barely-repressed flinch, but again, chooses to ignore it. "C'mon, let me show you your room."

The guestroom is nothing to write home about, but it's good enough for him. The bed in the corner of the room looks as if it hasn't been slept in for years, and the only other things occupying the space are a bookshelf and a side table. But, he figures that he'll be dead tired most days anyway, and the bed looks comfortable enough for him to collapse into and slip into dreamless sleep each night. He turns back to Kita with a genuine smile. "It's perfect, Kita-san. Thank you for having me. Seriously."

Kita smiles right back. "My pleasure, Atsumu. Seriously." He breaks eye contact and points to a room behind him in the hallway. "That right there's my bedroom, and the room just beyond is the bathroom. If you need anything at all, don't hesitate to ask. I recommend you try to get some sleep soon. From what I recall, you're not much of a morning person, right?"

Atsumu laughs sheepishly, because 'not a morning person' is quite possibly the understatement of the century—but he just nods in confirmation as he moves towards the bed with his duffel bag. 

"Okay, well, that's about to change. We start work slightly before dawn. I'll come to get you up around 4:00, alright?"

Atsumu stumbles and drops the heavy bag on his foot. " _Jesus Christ._ You're kidding."

Kita gives him another smile, this one teetering more on the side of teasing. "See you in the morning."

* * *

Kita was not kidding. 

His sleep-addled mind registers the warmth against his shoulder, and muscle memory encourages Atsumu to nuzzle his nose into the comforting heat before his brain has a chance to catch up. The warmth ( _a hand_ , he realizes) abandons his shoulder all too soon, but reappears as a sharp tug of Atsumu's earlobe—and Atsumu begins to recall some of his memories from the evening prior, and remembers with a painful squeeze somewhere within his ribcage that he's not in his too-empty bed in his too-empty apartment, but is instead waking up wrapped in the stiff sheets of an underused bed in his former captain's home before the sun has even prodded its fingers against the predawn darkness. The hand, again, vacates Atsumu's space, and its absence invites him to fall back into a deep slumber—but then the ceiling light overhead flickers to life, the sickly yellow light pushing its way through Atsumu's closed eyelids. He groans and instinctively shields his eyes from the artificial light's assault. "'S too early."

"I warned you, didn't I?"

Atsumu slowly pulls his hand away from his face, his eyes squinting against the star that seems to have found a home in Kita's ceiling, fighting against the glare to seek out Kita himself. Atsumu's eyes adjust to yellow incandescence, and his barely-open eyes find him standing in the corner of the room next to the light-switch, looking placid and tranquil and entirely unperturbed by the early hour. Atsumu flops back down against his pillow. "Five more minutes?"

Back when they were still in high school, and Atsumu would wage war against the alarm clocks at training camps, Kita would often acquiesce and grant his teammates a few more moments of serenity before the abrupt beginning of another grueling day—but he's an adult, and Atsumu is an adult, and neither of them has the luxury of allowing the sun a head start. "No can do, sorry. Meet me in the kitchen in fifteen minutes." He leaves the room without turning off the light, and Atsumu wonders how anyone could ever fool themselves into believing that Kita was a nice person.

Twenty minutes later, the two of them are climbing into Kita's well-loved and worn-down pick-up truck to make the short journey to the rice paddies. Atsumu stifles a yawn (or, at least, he tries to), ignoring how sleep inertia makes the stars above spin around like an ocean gyre, like a whirlpool of diamonds half-buried in tar. They make the drive in silence: usually, Atsumu's throat would itch with the urge to shatter the quiet—but whether it's the earliness of the hour, or the humming sputter of the truck's engine, or the smell of recent rainfall reminiscent in the air—something compels him to bask in the stillness. 

When they arrive at the rice paddies, Kita's two other employees are already present. He'd mentioned them in passing last night, but Atsumu had been so groggy and emotionally depleted that he hadn't heard their names (more likely: he'd heard their names and then he'd immediately forgotten them). Fortunately, the two figures notice when Kita's truck rolls to a stop, and they cease their work preparations to walk over and make their introductions. 

Fujisaki Aneko is a tall woman: even when standing next to a professional volleyball player, it's readily evident that she's of an above-average height. She wears glasses with circular rims that make her brown eyes appear double their actual size, and her auburn hair is tucked into a bun beneath a mustard yellow baseball cap. She tells Atsumu that she usually helps out on the farm during the summer months when school is out—she teaches elementary school-level science in downtown Toyooka during the year, but—"I love to get outside and get my hands dirty, and Kita-san's work is important to me." When he comments on the absence of Kansai-ben in her vocabulary, she smiles and tells him that she's from Hiroshima, that she hadn't moved to Hyogo until adulthood. 

Honda Chokichi is a stout man with a broad back, strengthened by years and years of hard labor. Since before Kita acquired the land, he's worked on the farm, knows it better than the back of his hand, and he helps out year-round. Atsumu wolf-whistles at the revelation that Honda is dating Kita's grandmother, Yumie, earning a smile from everybody present. 

Fujisaki and Honda meander back to finish their pre-workday duties, leaving Kita and Atsumu alone by the truck. "Oh, I almost forgot," Kita starts, and he walks back around towards the driver's side to grab a hat that's identical to his own: cone-shaped woven tweed with a cord to secure the hat attached at the sides. He holds it out towards Atsumu: "This is for you."

Atsumu's eyes flit between the proffered hat and the eyes of the person extending it towards him, his hands not moving from his sides to grab it. "For me?"

"Yes, for you." When Atsumu still doesn't move to take the hat, Kita rolls his eyes and rises onto his tiptoes to place the hat atop Atsumu's head. Atsumu tries not to flinch as Kita's fingers flutter to the soft and fleshy underside of his jaw, tightening the cord so that it lays snug beneath his chin. "I wasn't sure if Osamu would have thought to pack a hat like this, so I went ahead and got one for you. Wouldn't want you to get sunburned, would we?" Kita pulls on the rim of the hat so that it obscures Atsumu's entire forehead and the tops of his eyes, but Atsumu still manages to catch a glimpse of his sly smile, so he answers with one of his own.

Some things never change.

* * *

There were things Hana hadn't known, of course: she hadn't known that the scar on the back of Atsumu's left thigh had been given to him by Sakusa in a post-game locker room shouting match; she hadn't known that Atsumu only began taping his fingers after she made a remark about how she liked the softness of his hands during the offseason; she hadn't known that he had let someone take care of him, once, a lifetime ago. 

He's 16 years old, and he gets sick late in the flu season. It's nothing strong enough to knock him off of his feet entirely, but it is enough to make his brain squeeze against the walls of his skull like a balloon that's two breaths away from popping. His skin is flush with a fever's heat, and his stomach churns as violently as the lower deck of a ship caught within a hurricane. His mother and father both leave for work before they're sure of the severity of the ailment; _call us if it gets too bad_ tossed over their shoulders with both feet out of the door. Atsumu has to convince a concerned Osamu to go to school without him, but not before making him swear that he won't tell the team how sick he really is—he's hoping to get back to practice within the next few days, but that won't be possible with coaches breathing down his neck and shoving thermometers beneath his tongue. Osamu promises, and Atsumu collapses back into bed and sleeps. 

Had his head been a bit less foggy that day, he'd have recalled that Osamu is just as much a liar as he is, no matter what anyone claims. 

He's awoken by the sharp sound of his doorbell ringing around 4:00 that afternoon. Bleary-eyed and weighed down by vertigo and swollen sinuses, he stumbles to the door and yanks it open without first looking through the peep-hole—and it's Kita on the other side, holding a to-go bag filled with soup and cold medicine, and he's the most beautiful person Atsumu has ever seen. "Why aren't you at practice?" is what he accidentally blurts instead of _thank you,_ or _I'm happy to see you._

Kita somehow takes it all in stride with a soft but meaningful smile. "Coach said I should come to check on you. How are you?"

"Osamu, you traitorous bastard," Atsumu mumbles to himself as he opens the door wide enough for Kita to fully enter. Kita raises a brow expectantly, toeing his shoes off of his feet and pulling off his school blazer. He sets his bag down and moves into Atsumu's kitchen, pulling open drawers and cabinets as if he's been here a hundred times or more. "Fine," Atsumu lies. 

"You're lying," Kita says without turning around.

A plastic container of heated broth slides towards him from across the granite countertop. Atsumu catches it with a slight grin and a stutter in his chest that has more to do with how Kita is gently smiling as he rifles through Atsumu's pantry for tea bags and less to do with his illness. "Yeah, but only a little."

* * *

If, for some reason, he was granted the opportunity, he'd travel back in time—maybe to last week, or even to last month if he was _really_ lucky—to do a handful of things:

First, he'd shake past-Atsumu's shoulders and tell him to pop the question on Hana before she has the chance to cut and run; second, he'd tell past-Atsumu the perfect comeback for one of Sakusa's snarky remarks that he'll be hit with a few days from now; and finally, he'd point and laugh at past-Atsumu, mocking him for thinking his dainty hands were anything close to calloused, for thinking they were the epitome of tenacity.

The dense mounds of skin he'd painstakingly built across his palms over the past decade had cowered almost immediately in the face of hard, practical labor. Within a few hours of wielding shovels and rakes and hoes, his hands are screaming with blisters, frustrated by friction and red and raw against the rigid handles of farming equipment. Kita catches a glimpse of his tortured skin during one of their breaks; he combs through the bed of his truck in search of an extra pair of gloves. "The most important lesson I learned as a volleyball captain was always to carry a spare," he finds the extra gloves, which are old and worn but contain enough padding to cushion Atsumu's apparently baby-soft hands, and tosses them to Atsumu. "I mean, that's why we kept both you and Osamu around, after all."

"Kita-san, ouch!"

The grin Kita graces him with is unfamiliar to Atsumu, boyish, and lively in a way Kita's smiles never used to be—and Atsumu decides he likes this version of Kita. Sure, it's possible that he simply likes _every_ version of Kita—but this one seems happy, with an almost weightless quality that he'd never possessed when they'd known each other in high school. High school Kita had walked through hallways and gymnasiums with perfect posture—but upon closer inspection, it was hard to miss the taut tension he kept nestled between his shoulder blades, the cumbersome burden he always carried on his shoulders, like Atlas pushing a boulder up a mountain until time ceased its perpetual motion. This Kita still has perfect posture, but he's missing the debilitating nap-sack of responsibilities and duties he'd always hauled over his back: and Atsumu thinks he looks better without it.

* * *

  
  
  


[may]

Since childhood, Osamu has always been the one with the messy and ever-evolving sleep schedule: he would sometimes wake at the same time, but other times, he'd sleep until the morning sun became the afternoon sun, until breakfast trudged forwards and became lunch. Atsumu, on the other hand, arose like clockwork. Their mother claims that it was disconcerting (at least in the beginning), the way Atsumu would always wake up at the exact same time—no matter the season, no matter the day of the week, no matter how exhausting the previous day had been—he was always up and out of bed at 8:00 on the dot. It frustrated his friends at sleepovers, the way his eyes would fly open, even without an alarm clock blaring in his ear—but it was just what he was used to. It was his routine, and Atsumu isn't fond of breaking routine, no matter what Osamu claims.

So it's easy—far too easy, really—for him to get lost in the daily rituals, in the mind-numbing monotony of carrying bags of soil and pulling weeds day in and day out. Atsumu thrives when he has a set routine to follow: whether it was the popsicle-stained dog days of elementary school summers, or the after-school practices in a high school gym, or his sweat-soaked evening run through the streets of Osaka: Atsumu finds religion in the steadiness of repetition, in the feeling of falling asleep and knowing for sure what will take place when he wakes the following day. It doesn't take long before Atsumu allows his life as a temporary rice farmer to become muscle memory, as well. 

Kita still has to drag him out of bed most mornings, but Atsumu no longer puts up a fight (not really, anyways). His hands grow firm around the brutal wooden handles of farming equipment; the skin of his nose and cheeks burns under the unrelenting midday May sun and then peels, and then browns; underdeveloped muscles in the underutilized regions of his body now ache with overexertion at the end of each day, coaxing him to sleep the instant he shuts his eyes. He still wakes up and instinctively searches for the absent body in the sheets beside him—and his heart still constricts when his fingers close around nothing but air. His fingers still frequent the fabric of his pockets to wrap themselves around the phantom velvet box that weighs him down like rocks—but not as often as they used to.

It's not until one morning halfway through the month that he answers Osamu's call and finally permits him to pawn off the unworn engagement ring. He's on his break with Kita, lounging in what little shade the truck's shadow deems them worthy of, and Atsumu has grown tired of Osamu breathing down his neck about getting rid of the ring, about letting go of the fiance that never was. "Yeah, whatever, just make sure you give me whatever money you get for it. That damn thing was expensive." 

Osamu doesn't immediately rejoice the way Atsumu had expected him to: instead, he asks, "are you sure?" in that annoyingly soft voice, the voice that's not unkind nor malicious, the one that's reserved exclusively for the moments when Osamu is worried he'll have to pick up the debris resulting from the impending disaster. As if Atsumu is fabricated from glass, as if the pitch of Osamu's voice could shatter him in an instant. Atsumu can't stand it. 

"Yes, I'm sure. Try and get a good price for it, alright?" He says, hanging up before Osamu can say something gross like _I hope you're doing alright_ or _I love you_. His fingers dig into his pocket without his permission, seeking the velvet prison that he knows isn't there. 

"Do you want to talk about it?" Kita asks.

Atsumu yanks his hand from his pocket—and, feeling the suffocating weight of Kita's eyes boring into him, suddenly discovers that his shoelaces are utterly fascinating. "Talk about what?"

The distinct sinking feeling that comes with disappointing someone you admire washes over Atsumu like the high tide when Kita rolls his eyes. And sure, maybe he's been less than forthright about the whole "my ex-girlfriend dumped me two days before I'd planned to propose to her" thing, but in his defense, it was hard for him to conjure her image in his mind without feeling like the earth's magnetic field had flipped. He and Kita both have done a phenomenal job of pretending like they can't see the elephant in the room thus far, but it seems like Kita is ready to burst the bubble, to point out the elephant in all its seven-tons glory. "Hana." 

"Oh." 

Kita allows the silence to linger for a few moments, lets it settle over Atsumu's shoulders like a cloak. "You don't have to if you're not ready. But I'm happy to listen whenever you are."

Wiping a hand to the back of his lips to catch an escaped water droplet, Kita rises from the shade; the midday sun casts a halo around his head, and Atsumu's shoelaces aren't so fascinating anymore because Kita's words act as a crowbar to the blockage in his throat. The deluge is let loose, and because he's always been afraid of drowning, he has no choice other than to swim _:_ "I miss her."

The hand falls away from Kita's lips, and he lowers his eyes onto Atsumu—and Atsumu thinks of all of those Italian Renaissance paintings, the ones with angels and the saints that he's never even heard of immortalized in oil and turpentine, caged in gold-trimmed frames and nailed to the walls of French palaces and Spanish churches—and _what a pity_ , he thinks, _that they never had the chance to paint this one, too._ Kita leans his back against the truck, his eyes still glued to Atsumu from above, and waits patiently for Atsumu to translate the abstract tangle in his chest into something tangible and concrete he can form with his lips, with his tongue—"I just wasn't expecting it, you know? I think I would've been okay—or I would've been better, at least—if I'd seen it coming."

Next to him, Kita's boot scuffs against loose soil as he kicks a pebble. "Wouldn't you still miss her if you'd had a head's up?"

"Probably."

Kita just hums and pushes himself off of the truck, and he tugs on the end of the cord that rests against his Adam's apple to pull the hat back onto his head. "I don't know of many things in life that actually come with a warning label attached. Sometimes you're unlucky, and you get blindsided." He extends his hand towards Atsumu to pull him off of the ground, which Atsumu accepts—and he's stricken by the unchanged assuredness that Kita has always kept nestled in the heartlines of his palms. The calluses Atsumu's knuckles boast from years of volleyball are instantly shamed by the rugged terrain of Kita's own hand—how can something be so firm and so gentle simultaneously?—"if the outcome was always going to be the same, then all you can control is your attitude, right?"

Dejavu whacks Atsumu over the head as he begs his fingers not to wrap around the emptiness where Kita's hand had been mere moments ago, but they clench and unclench regardless, grasping at nothing—perhaps, grasping at everything. "Right."

* * *

It gets easier, after that: to talk about it, to talk about her. A few gentle prods and pushes from Kita had been enough to loosen the blockage that had become lodged in Atsumu's throat somewhere between crying his eyes out in his too-empty bed and being forcibly relocated to the countryside by his friends: and instead of feeling like the mere mention of her name would end in catastrophe, would result in him vomiting acidic bile, he instead feels like he's racing towards the ecstasy of weightlessness, like he's gradually removing the thousands of pebbles that have been accumulating in the pit of his stomach since she left his life with, _of course, I love you, I do, I do, but isn't it better for both of us if we call it off now?_ He feels a little lighter every time he unearths some new piece of the puzzle, some never-before-told anecdote from the life he'd shared with her. He realizes that he hadn't just been carrying the weight of a never-worn engagement ring, but the weight of her—of everything he'd had with her—as a whole. So he keeps on emptying his pockets until there's nothing left:

Seated at the table for dinner, when Kita asks if he wants red wine or white, he chooses the white and says it was his and Hana's favorite (he's been sipping on reds for weeks now because memories aren't exactly known for their honey-sweet flavor, and because he has no desire to remember how her kisses taste; but when his lips connect with the viscous liquid, he remembers them fondly, and somehow manages to swallow). And at the rice paddies, when Fujisaki shows up to work wearing a pair of silver hoop earrings that appear identical to the ones he'd gotten Hana for their first anniversary, the ones he'd given to her when he was sure she was safe to love, he says so. He empties his chest of stories about the woman he loves, the woman who had loved him back: even if only briefly.

He prods at her ghost the way he pokes at the newly-formed scabs that grace the divots between his fingers where the shovel's handle rubbed the skin raw. She still stings, sometimes: but Atsumu has cleaned enough scrapes and skinned knees in his lifetime, or had them cleaned for him, to know that the sting is necessary; because without the alcohol wipes and the hydrogen peroxide and the lidocaine, the wound can only fester and become infected, become septic. The sting is necessary, and thankfully, it's brief: and the relief that follows is only just short of divine. 

"You seem better. Happier," Kita says as he tops off Atsumu's wine glass with the same chardonnay that Hana had ordered on their very first date. 

Atsumu meets Kita's eyes as he raises the glass to his lips, letting the bittersweet liquid cascade down his throat; it doesn't burn. "I think I am."

* * *

There were things Hana hadn't known, of course: she hadn't known that the mustard-yellow hair he sported in his high school photos hadn't been intentional but was instead the result of Atsumu's ignorance about the existence of purple shampoo; she hadn't known that the "freckle" on Atsumu's nose was nothing more than the closed-up hole from a tipsy nose piercing that he recalls with extreme regret; she hadn't known that before he'd loved her, he'd loved someone else. 

He's 17 years old, and he finally knows how it feels to be on the wrong side of invisible infatuation, of unrequited love. Atsumu wonders if his gaze is intense enough to send pin-prick shivers down the back of Kita's neck; if he's collapsing beneath the weight of Atsumu's eyes as they track him through the room. He's tried to look away (sort of), and he's tried moving on (he hasn't)—but Kita's essence must be composed of something magnetic, some kind of unprecedented event horizon or gravitational singularity because Atsumu swears there's a force that keeps dragging his eyes back when he dares to look away. 

He's used to people making comparisons between himself and Osamu, but he never grows used to how they always manage to draw the wrong conclusions. So many people have assumed that Atsumu is the one who rushes in, the one who drags his twin into his every impulse, the one who never thinks anything through—when really, it's the other way around. Osamu has always been the brave one, has always been the one to take the leap, peeking over his shoulder at his brother and silently asking if he'll come along—and Atsumu always does, of course, he does: but never without hesitation; never without wariness; never without something bordering cowardice. 

And so the half-baked confession never learns how to shape itself around Atsumu's cowardly lips. Kita is Atsumu's first love, and it's a love that Atsumu forces himself to swallow back down, a love that Atsumu never finds the courage to plunge himself into—headfirst and fearless, like the reckless child that chances a graceless backflip from the diving board; either too brave or too stupid to worry about cracking open his skull, too foolish and one-track minded to worry about staining the concrete pink. 

(And if the thrill of twirling backward through the air somehow surpasses the blistering burn of inhaled chlorine—well, Atsumu wouldn't know.)

* * *

When he really thinks about it, there is, at minimum, a fifty percent chance that he's going to murder Osamu upon his return to Osaka. 

There aren't all that many things that Atsumu can remember with near-perfect clarity; he's always been a little scatter-brained, and sure, maybe he took the words immortalized on his high school's banner ( _who needs memories?)_ a bit too literally. But there are some things that he can recall with such ease, almost as if he's traveled backward through time and is watching the scene unfold all over again: like the way Osamu had wailed when he broke his arm in the fifth grade; the first time he'd nailed the quick-set with Shouyou; the first time Hana had said _I love you_ ; the time Osamu had sworn that Atsumu would be able to practice volleyball during his countryside post-breakup rehabilitating getaway—

If only Atsumu were better at remembering that Osamu is just as much a liar as Atsumu. 

The off-season rules are fairly strict at the professional level: he's not allowed to practice with the same intensity and rigor as he would during the season and in the weeks leading up to the regular season, but he has to practice _just_ enough to still be in top form when he returns to the Jackals' court a few months from now. It's a tricky line to toe, especially given his natural affinity for (1) rule-breaking and (2) playing volleyball during any and every spare moment. The seasons he'd spent with Shouyou as his teammate had been particularly problematic for both of them, a failed exercise in self-control: because, as it turns out, allowing two enablers to live together during what's supposed to be a period of rest and recovery is nothing short of a disastrous idea. Atsumu would love to avoid a repeat of that situation, which is why the prospect of spending his few precious months of downtime at a semi-remote rice farm had been so appealing. He'd be able to stay in impeccable physical shape thanks to all of the grueling manual labor, and as an added bonus, he wouldn't be tempted to spend 10 hours a day in the gym the way he is when he spends the off-season at home. 

However:

The sound of a ball striking his palm is as familiar as the sound of the voice inside his head; a cloud of dust and dirt sweeps around him as his feet return to the concrete surface, but the telltale thud of the ball against the polished wood of the court is absent, replaced with the dull thump of the volleyball against the earthy ground. "Was that in? I couldn't tell."

"Hmm." Kita squints from where he sits, squatting next to Atsumu's makeshift volleyball court to determine if the ball had been in-bounds. He shrugs apologetically, "beats me. The line you drew keeps getting smudged and covered up when the ball hits it."

"Well, if the ball hit it, then it was out."

Kita holds up his hands in mock surrender as he turns around to grab the ball from where it stopped rolling. "Look, I'm just telling you what I see." 

Atsumu wants to pull his hair out. His frustration must be written all over his face because Kita huffs a quiet laugh and tosses the ball back towards Atsumu, instigating a round of bumping the ball back and forth. "I'm sure you already know, but," he pauses to get into a receiving position as Atsumu bumps the ball back to him in a high arc, "Fujisaki works at an elementary school in town."

Atsumu raises an eyebrow as he positions himself below the falling ball and prepares to set it. He did already know. "And?"

"It has a gymnasium. A full-sized gymnasium." Kita's eyes fixate on Atsumu's toss as he runs up and leaps into the air, spiking the ball somewhere in the vicinity of the poorly-constructed fake court's backline. "Huh. You're right; I couldn't tell if that was any good."

"It was good—but more importantly, are you implying that Fujisaki can get me to a real volleyball court?"

Kita makes a non-committal sound and shrugs, but he's smiling. "I'm just saying it wouldn't hurt to ask. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, and since we're ahead of our work schedule for the month anyway, I had been toying around with the idea of giving everyone the day off tomorrow," he says, lifting the hem of his tee-shirt to wipe at the sweat piling up in his hairline. Atsumu doesn't look at the exposed skin of his stomach because he's fooled himself into believing he's mastered the art of restraint. "It might not be a bad idea for you to put in some real work. Can't have Jackals' fans upset with me for letting those skills of yours fall to the wayside, right?"

He tries not to laugh at Atsumu's joyful cheer that he punctuates with a childish fist pump, but he fails. "You're the best boss I've ever had, Kita-san!"

Kita frowns slightly as Atsumu runs off to find Fujisaki somewhere within the maze of rice paddies. "I'm the _only_ boss you've ever had," Kita mutters at Atsumu's receding back. 

* * *

He's not sure, yet, if it's a good thing or a bad thing, that he might genuinely be moving on from Hana—because previously, he had been under the impression that the sound he'd missed most in the world was her voice. As it turns out, however, the sound he'd _actually_ missed most was the thunderclap of a volleyball exploding off of a linoleum court and echoing throughout an empty gym. Atsumu hears Fujisaki clapping her hands ferociously and whooping wildly from the sidelines: "You really _are_ a professional volleyball player!"

Atsumu feigns offense with a scoff, "What, did you think I made it up?"

Fujisaki shrugs good-naturedly. "I mean, you really struggled with just, like, correctly using a shovel for the first few days. What was I supposed to think?" They both laugh as Atsumu flips her off.

He spends the rest of his afternoon practicing serves while Fujisaki heads further into town to run a few errands. She returns a couple of hours later to pick him up, and as they leave, Fujisaki gifts him her spare key and permits him to use the gym whenever he pleases. "It's usually unlocked, so you might run into people every now and then. But I'd guess that since it's summer, you should have plenty of space to practice whenever you feel like it."

And as much as Atsumu has loved tilling the land and cultivating hearty crops these past few weeks, he'd be lying if he'd said he didn't miss volleyball. The gym and its atmosphere are nothing like what he's grown used to: there are no tiered layers of bleachers filled with screaming fans, no world-class coach screaming in his ear, no oversized toddlers who accidentally wandered onto the court and somehow ended up as his teammates—but the court still squeaks beneath his sneakers, and the ball still lands confidently just within the backline with a resounding smack that leaves no room for doubt—and that's more than enough for Atsumu. 

* * *

Although he doesn't specialize in the field of neuroscience, Atsumu can confidently assume that the human brain is capable of some pretty fucked up, gnarly shit; and he's pretty sure that the most disturbing thing about the mind is that it manages to convince us that the adversities we face are somehow unique; that the demons that visit us during the night are brand new inhabitants in this plane of reality; that no other person in human history has experienced the things we experience. We lie to ourselves, pretending like our struggles are wholly unprecedented—and the brain not only lets us get away with it but _encourages_ it, and—

"Maybe you've had enough wine for one night, yeah?"

Steady fingertips plant themselves on the rim of Atsumu's glass, every detail of those one-in-a-million fingerprints engraving themselves upon the transparent glass. Atsumu extends his own hand, wrapping his fist around the stem of the wine glass as Kita attempts to pull it away from him. "Or," he drawls, " _you_ haven't had _enough_ wine for one night. Right, Kita-san?"

Kita pulls a face but ultimately ends up relinquishing his grip on the glass, saying, "I think I've had enough, for the time being, thanks very much." Atsumu shrugs and brings the wine to his lips once again as he leans forward, digging his pointy elbows into the marbled surface of the counter to watch intently as Kita glides back into the kitchen.

He's sure that he hasn't had too much wine—he doesn't even feel tipsy, let alone drunk—but the room's atmosphere is now tinged in a soft sort of glow, the kind of hazy vignette that filters through your eyes when they grow a little too fuzzy around the edges—but he's not drunk, nor is he tipsy: he's merely in the mood for a bit of philosophizing:

The trials and tribulations Atsumu has faced throughout his life are not rare or extraordinary, nor are they worth canonizing in the stanzas of epic poems; no single person experiences anything that hasn't been felt by another person before. Everyone's had their heart broken at some point or another; he's sure of this; maybe not by a lover or a friend, but by a life event, by a song or a book, or the utter disenchantment that sets in somewhere in-between growing up and growing old when you finally, _finally_ realize that life is dull and tiresome and tedious and— 

"You know, I always pegged you for a happy-drunk."

Atsumu's eyes snap back to awareness to find Kita looking at him from where he stands over a pot on the stove. "Huh," Atsumu says elegantly.

Kita's eyes move away from Atsumu and back down towards the pot of boiling water, but a wry smile still plays upon his lips. "Nothing; I guess I'd just assumed you'd be the type to get all riled up when you've had a couple of drinks. This whole doom and gloom, 'life is so tedious and sad' thing is not what I'd expected from you."

Silence briefly settles over the room, the only sounds being Kita's subtle movements and the gentle burbling of simmering water. Atsumu gulps: he hadn't realized he'd been philosophizing out loud. "Well. You know me: always full of surprises."

Kita waves him off using the ladle he's holding in his hand. "My apologies for assuming." The two of them continue to stew in the quiet as Kita adds salt and pepper to the pot. He briefly disappears into the pantry and returns with a box of noodles, and pours them into boiling water. He then turns away from the stove to face Atsumu—and his face is red from the constant flux of heat coming from the stove, and his eyes are soft in ways Atsumu usually resents in other people but can't get enough of when it's coming from Kita—and says, "You can keep thinking aloud. If you want. I mean, I did tell you I'm always happy to listen, didn't I?"

And Atsumu abruptly wishes he hadn't even touched the bottle of chardonnay tonight, or that he could pull a reverse-Jesus and transform all of this wine into water because the room is swimming, and because there's not exactly a definitive timeline for this whole end-of-relationship recovery thing (although there should be—wouldn't that just be the most useful invention in the world?), but he thinks it was supposed to take him more than a month to cope with his broken heart, more than a month to piece back together the wreckage she'd left behind; he'd been in love with Hana for over a year and a half, and surely, no one gets over a broken heart that quickly—

But the sun has dipped low in the sky: the days squeeze out just a little excess sunlight as spring begins to spill into summer, and the window in the kitchen faces west, and the stove is positioned just in front of the window, which means Kita is drenched in resplendent red/orange/gold, which means he somehow looks more divine, more sublime than he already does—and sure, he might have loved Hana for nearly a year and a half—but he's loved Kita for almost a decade, hasn't he?

He hears the ear-splitting sound of shattering glass before registering that the sound came from somewhere beneath him. He and Kita both look at the ground around Atsumu's feet, where his half-filled glass of chardonnay has become a perilous patchwork of a hundred tiny shards of broken glass. "Well," he says, as Kita returns from the pantry, this time armed with a broom and a dustpan, and somehow still beautiful, " _Now_ I've had enough wine for one night."

"Great. That means you can fix me a glass while I clean this up, then." Kita holds out his hand for Atsumu to grasp, gingerly helping him tiptoe around the treacherous terrain of fragmented glass, pulling him to safety. Momentum brings him far too close to Kita, practically chest-to-chest. Kita looks at Atsumu. The final traces of sunset focus all their radiance against Kita's back, illuminating his silhouette, casting a halo around his figure.

Kita looks at Atsumu. Atsumu looks away.

* * *

And you know by now, I hope, that there were things Hana hadn't known, because no one can know everything about a person who only lets you sink your claws skin-deep: she hadn't known that Atsumu's vast wealth of knowledge concerning ancient Greek mythology was merely the product of Osamu's brief but intense _Percy Jackson_ obsession; she hadn't known that Atsumu had been incredibly wary of even going on that very first date with her—after all, he's a Libra, and she's a Virgo, and the astrological compatibility between the two of them was virtually nonexistent; she hadn't known that Atsumu had loved someone before he'd loved her—that he had never stopped loving that someone, even while he loved her. 

(And when had he started using the past tense, 'love' becoming 'loved'?)

He lies awake in a bed with sheets that somehow maintain their starch-stiffness, in a room that isn't his, in a house that feels like a time capsule, like a funhouse mirror of what could have been, an echo-chamber of every comfort he knows he's undeserving of. The bed is smaller than the one in his Osaka apartment, and it's somehow still too cold, too empty—but Atsumu's always been a clingy sleeper, so the bed is _always_ too empty, has been since he was a child—but he's no longer rolling onto his side to bury his nose in the phantom strands of brown hair; no longer seeking out her steady warmth, her strawberry-lotion-slicked skin. Instead, his half-asleep fingers extend towards the door, magnetized through muscle memory: as though he could reach into the hallway, across the hallway, and push his hand through the door opposite his, and uncover something ancient, concrete and familiar; something vernal, endless and nameless. 

(How can someone manage to get their heart broken when they've never even removed it from its bubble-wrapped packaging? How can someone surrender their soul, their everything, to someone who doesn't even want it? To someone who never even asked for it?)

The hallway light flickers on, the soft light spilling through the gap between the door and the floor—and because Atsumu has endured his entire life by feeding himself an endless stream of merciful lies, he pretends like he doesn't hear the muted pitter-patter of socked feet gliding across the moonlit hardwood floors of the hall. He pretends like he doesn't want to follow those socked feet in any and every direction they might choose, and he pretends like he wouldn't jump at the chance to trail after gentle footfalls to the ends of the earth (Atsumu thinks he'd follow him off of a cliff if it was what Kita desired of him). He pretends like he's sound asleep in this too-empty bed that isn't his. He wonders if cowardice is a mutable characteristic, if it's something you grow out of—like shoes, like obsessions with Greek mythology. 

(And which, if either, do we outgrow faster: love or cowardice?) 

(And maybe Atsumu has two functioning hearts: the one he'd loved Hana with, fully and loudly and sincerely, and yes, in the past-tense—but safely, too, always safely; and the other heart had been meant for Kita, reserved for him whenever he wanted it, raw and open and pleading, like a mildewy heirloom at an estate sale, alone at its display table, passed over and passed by, no one stopping to look at it.)

The hallway light turns off; the estate sale ends; perhaps, some things are destined to accumulate dust.


	2. solstice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> self-indulgence and self-sabotage are but a hair's width away, as told by one Miya Atsumu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: i describe eating pretty graphically in this chapter? nothing gross BUT if you get icky about that it starts at "And as he eats in complete solitude," and ends around "He misses the jump-out-of-his-skin clatter of Hana's fork against her plate."

_I offer you my terrible sanity_

_the eternal voice that keeps me from reaching you_

_though we are close to each other every autumn_

_I feel the desperation of a giant freezing in cement_

_when I touch the door you're pressed against_

_the color of your letter that reminds me of flamingos_

_\- Summer (a love poem) by Frank Lima_

[june]

"Hey, are you alright?"

Atsumu frowns, and through a stifled yawn, says, "Hello to you, too, Keiji-kun. Why wouldn't I be alright?" His bleary eyes find the clock hanging from the wall: he’d only been asleep for 45 minutes before the obnoxious blare of his phone's ringtone had reached into his ear canal, yanking him from a dreamless midday nap and casting him into immediate confusion, made worse by the urgency lacing Keiji's voice. 

The sigh that Keiji releases through the phone’s speaker is somehow both relieved and impatient: "It's just that lately, you've been listening to a lot of Mitski, according to your Spotify profile. Like, a _lot_ of Mitski. Really late at night, too."

Atsumu quickly sits up, his state of confusion rapidly devolving into irritation: of all things, Keiji wakes him up to apprehend him in a Mitski-related allegation? "Okay, _why_ are you even looking at my Spotify profile? I didn't even know that was a thing."

"Yeah, there's a little live feed thingy on the desktop app that shows you what your friends are listening to. Yesterday, you listened to 'First Love / Late Spring' like eight times in a row. At 2:00 in the morning."

Betrayal slices through Atsumu like a serrated blade: Mitski hours are a sacred and private time in the life of any self-respecting person, and he refuses to be shamed for it: "Uh, yeah, 'cause it's a good song?"

Keiji snorts, "Sure, it's a wonderful song—if you're dealing with a painful and insatiable yearning, that is." Atsumu scoffs, offended, and prepares to launch into a litany of defenses as to why he's listening to an unhealthy amount of Mitski when the other man continues talking: "Look, I'm just trying to check-in and make sure you're doing okay. I know you said you were feeling better the last time we talked, but sometimes the hurt comes and goes."

Atsumu reclines back on the bed once more with the phone still held to his ear, once again partly appreciative and partly resentful of his brother-in-law. He's always been fond of Keiji for a multitude of reasons, both for his sake and for his brother's: Keiji is kind, and smart, and funny, and caring—and at the moment, unfortunately, far too perceptive. "Yes, Keiji, I'm fine. I promise," he lies.

A voice that definitely doesn't belong to Keiji answers him: "He's using his lying voice, Keiji."

"Oh my god! Keiji-kun, we've talked about this: _why_ are you on speaker-phone? And Osamu, you should fuck off; I bet you don't even know who Mitski is."

Keiji's voice replies this time (though he can still hear Osamu's petulant grumbling about how he _definitely_ knows who Mitski is): "Atsumu, you're deflecting. And you know that Osamu could figure all of this out even if I hadn't put you on speaker-phone—he could just use his twin telepathy powers. Now tell me, were you really using your lying voice?"

" _Jesus Christ_ , we don't have twin—actually, you know what: nevermind." He scrubs a hand over his face in exasperation, and he's suddenly glad that he chose to decline Kita's invitation to go into town for a few hours this afternoon and instead elected to take a nap—if Osamu intends to remain an active participant in this conversation, then there's a near certainty that Atsumu’s going to end up yelling profanities; Kita had already witnessed that side of him plenty of times when they were teenagers, and he thinks he'd rather avoid that same embarrassing fate as an adult. He calms himself with a deep exhale, and because it's what he does best, he chooses to deflect once again: "Okay, well, if you’re so perfect, then what the hell do you listen to at two in the morning?"

For a moment, there's absolute silence. Atsumu drags the phone away from his ear to check if maybe the signal dropped, but the call is still connected—and when he brings the phone back to his ear, he wishes he hadn't: "'Tsumu, I hadn't exactly planned on ever sharing my love-making playlist with you, but if you really want it—."

Atsumu hangs up and decides to learn how to change his Spotify settings.

* * *

As a child, Atsumu had carried within him the distinct feeling that the progression of time was nonlinear and far more dynamic than everyone ever gave it credit for: sure, the rate that the earth rotates and revolves around the sun is something steady, static, and perhaps unchanging—but he swears, even as a 24-year-old man, that hours and minutes and days and seconds can expand and contract however they please; that the clocks on the wall aren’t beholden to anyone or anything, and don't inherently sync up with the ones inside your head. Time is not a pendulum, nor is it a flat circle: time, he thinks, is an inchworm: it bunches up like a ball of tangled twine, the second-hand stubbornly digging its heels into the cardboard backdrop of an analog clock and refusing to march forward; sometimes, it launches itself forward; explodes outwards like a torpedo; stretches itself out like an endless strip of saran wrap that just won't tear itself from the roll. It warps and bends; it is both made from both lightning and molasses—it is, without a doubt, the cruelest thing ever crafted by mankind's thoughtless, hateful hands. 

And it's with this in mind that Atsumu declares to himself that, with the notable exception of Shouyou's birthday, June is perhaps the worst month of them all. T. S. Eliot had made a believer of Atsumu when he'd written that April was the cruelest month because April is the month where his life fell apart; April is the month his apartment transformed into the decaying husk of something that used to have a pulse; April is the month that pushed him into the depths of the canyon with a faulty parachute; April revitalizes necrotic roots with its cruel tears, and pries open budding flower blossoms with its vengeful fingers—and Atsumu knows to tread lightly in the golden warmth late spring's unrivaled fury. 

But with a little help from time's merciless forwards crawl, Atsumu discovers that June harbors for him a hatred so vast and so deep of which the likes of April could never dream of replicating: June is the month that tries persuading his heart that it should piece itself back together for the sheer purpose of shattering it against the kitchen's tiled floor, like a half-filled glass of chardonnay. June is the month that burns the 80s-style wallpaper and precarious gold-trimmed picture frames into the backs of his eyelids, fools him into thinking this house could somehow be his home. June is the month when his mind constructs mirage after blissful mirage of a life that Atsumu wants so intensely it burns like saltwater in the back of his throat—a life that Atsumu could never find himself worthy of inhabiting. 

June is the month that never, never, _never_ ends. 

Or maybe June is the month that merely proves his internal clocks have never been calibrated correctly because no one else seems to fall victim to the torturous trudge: because other than learning what a private session is on Spotify, nothing _really_ changes. The hours of the days stretch longer as the sun expands her empire further across the sky with each passing day; the cool, small droplets of spring's gentle rain showers grow bigger and fatter as the heat-soaked showers of summer empty into the endless afternoons; the weeds in the rice paddies grow just the slightest bit faster and taller; Kita's laughs come easily and more frequently, light and airy and always a little louder if he's had one or two glasses of wine—and Atsumu is sick of noticing these things. He's sick of wishing the rice plants would simultaneously freeze in place and continue growing until the tip of the stalk brushes its wispy fingers across the cloud bottoms, as if Atsumu has crashlanded in the universe of Jack and the fucking beanstalk. He's sick of listening to Mitski on repeat while the stars grow dim against the creeping dawn of each new day; he's sick of the constantly-peeling sunburn on the back of his neck; he's sick of the way the calendar pages stick to one another and won't let him flip beyond this perpetual month.

He thinks that his heart is mending itself of the damage dealt by Hana in April at the same rate it now lacerates itself for Kita in June: so really, it just remains in tatters; one step forward, one step back, or however the saying goes.

He wishes June would end. He wishes he could superglue the shards of the shattered chardonnay wine glass back together. He wishes he could break it again. He thinks he'd kill for a glimpse of July. 

* * *

The familiar echo of footsteps coming down the hallway doesn't register at first: but when the soft footfalls come to an abrupt halt, he's hyper-aware of the sudden absence of sound. Atsumu looks up from where he's sitting on the couch—he stills his mouth, stops chewing on the Kit Kat bar he's plucked from the stash that Kita keeps stocked in the pantry—and finds Kita standing in the hallway's entrance, with his mug suspended halfway to his lips, his eyes comically wide and fixed upon Atsumu, his ordinarily placid face contorting around a peculiar expression of perplexity. Atsumu waits for Kita to offer some semblance of an explanation—and when he's confronted by total silence, he slowly turns around, afraid that maybe there's something (or someone) behind him that's causing Kita to look as though he's seen a ghost—but there's nothing there. He turns back around, his dry throat protesting as he swallows down the chalky remains of a Kit Kat bar: "Kita-san, are you alright?"

Kita blinks slowly, and the confused look falls away, replaced with narrowed eyes: "I'm fine. I'm just confused."

_That makes two of us_ , Atsumu wants to say. "About?"

Kita briefly moves into the kitchen to place his mug upon the island counter. His eyes stay pinned to Atsumu, his motions slow and deliberate—as though he's afraid that any sudden movements will spook Atsumu, causing him to pounce and attack like a feral animal. "I just don't think I've ever seen you actively choose to spend your time reading a book, is all," he says as he walks back into the living room. He gently taps his hand against one of Atsumu's ankles, encouraging him to remove his feet from the table. 

Atsumu scoffs, and, ignoring the blitz of static that races from the spot where Kita's fingers connected with his skin, obediently moves his feet from the table's waxy wooden surface. "Well, you'd be surprised to learn that I'm not _actually_ illiterate, Kita-san. Not completely, anyway."

"When in this conversation did I say you were illiterate? I'm just surprised to see you reading a book of your own free will," Kita says, casually settling onto the leather couch adjacent to the oversized loveseat that Atsumu currently occupies. "Especially," he says as he reaches across the space between them, tugging the book away from Atsumu until he's able to read the cover—and tries his hardest to stifle his laughter once he realizes which book it is: " _The Lorax._ Truly, some iconic ecological literature. Wonderful choice."

"Listen: considering it's a book for children, it’s surprisingly deep. Also, I got it from _your_ bookshelf, so you don't get to be judgmental."

"I’m not being judgmental; it really is famous in the ecological literature genre."

As he feels himself losing the battle he wages against the inevitable flush of his cheeks, Atsumu rolls his eyes and swats Kita's hand away with an impish grin. "Yeah, well. I already made my way through your surprisingly extensive collection of sustainable farming DIY books, so fiction seemed like the obvious next step. Although, your fiction books _also_ seem to all be about sustainable agriculture, weirdly enough. Figured I should start with the thinnest one on the shelf."

Kita lifts both eyebrows in surprise, as he'd been unaware of Atsumu's deep dives into the shelves of his old bookcase—but ultimately, decides to leave the subject untouched for the time being. "And?"

"And what?"

Kita graces him with an unimpressed look, rolling his eyes good-naturedly: "What do you think of the book?"

Flipping the pages with his thumb, Atsumu relishes in the feeling of each thin piece of paper rustling over the increasingly calloused skin of his hands. "It's a good book, but all of this climate change and deforestation shit is super depressing." Kita nods understandingly, which Atsumu interprets as an invitation to continue talking: "Like, the trees in this book are so important to all of these animals, and to the town—and this guy and his company just comes through and, what destroys all of these forests? To make _scarves_? It's infuriating!"

"Yeah, well," Kita leans further back in his own seat, his head coming to rest upon the back of the couch so that his eyes are pointed upwards at the pristine white ceiling overhead, and he contemplates his response. "People don't always think about the mark they're leaving behind, how their actions affect the natural world. It's so much easier to take than it is to give back, especially when you're not the one having to deal with the consequences. No company is stopping to think about the trees: all they're thinking about is the money they can make from the trees."

And it's both terrifying and amazing, Atsumu thinks, that Kita can make him feel so strongly about something that, up until about a month ago, had never even crossed his mind. He thinks Kita could create a passionate advocate out of anyone, for just about anything—his dedication so potent it's practically contagious. "You really care about this kind of thing, don't you, Kita-san?" he says. 

Kita's head lolls to the side so that he can stare right into Atsumu's eyes—and his eyes are somehow both gentle and determined, his gaze simultaneously vulnerable and piercing—Atsumu doesn't dare allow himself to look away: "Well, someone's gotta care; might as well be me."

He wonders just how colossal; how breathtaking; how intangible something must be to capture and hold onto Kita Shinsuke's undivided attention; wonders what kind of miracles the gods had to conjure up to cause Kita to cherish something so unflinchingly; he wants to know what sort of tremendously beautiful terror wrenched open Kita's eyes and forced him not only to look but to _see_ ; he wants to know—has to know—what was so impalpably sublime that it made the act of looking away unimaginable; impossible. Atsumu wants to study it, wants to learn how to shape his sharpened edges into something worthy of claiming Kita's piercing and vulnerable gaze: "What made you care?"

Kita hums, thinking, and rolls his head back around to face the ceiling. His eyelids flutter shut, and a tiny smile finds its way to his lips. The sun filters in through the slats in the window's blinds, painting the slope of Kita's face where his eyelashes caress the tops of his cheekbones: "Nothing; maybe everything." 

Atsumu deflates, not satisfied with Kita's vague answer. "What does that even mean?"

"It means that the thing that made me care probably won't be the same thing that makes you care—but either way, you'll know it when you see it." Atsumu rolls his eyes, but somehow still believes in what Kita says: no matter how cryptic. Kita rises from his seat and shoves Atsumu's feet off of the table once more: "It’d be great if you’d come help me make dinner as soon as you finish your Dr. Suess book, please."

* * *

If we assume the law of large numbers: Atsumu would like to think that, in a hypothetical alternate universe, there exists a version of himself that fulfills the many baseless presumptions people believe to be true of the actual version of himself that exists in this universe. The alternate-universe-Atsumu—the one that checks every box and meets every one of these presumptions—is probably doomed to spend his life in solitary confinement because some of the assumptions concerning Atsumu’s character are harsh, to say the least. Yet, actual-universe-Atsumu thinks he might be envious of some of the alleged character flaws harbored by alternate-universe-Atsumu because at least alternate-universe-Atsumu isn’t cursed with the mortifying ability to see himself as he truly is. And yes, he’s grown uncomfortably familiar with people drawing comparisons between himself and Osamu because people have been seeking out the correlations and juxtapositions between them since they were nothing more than two formless smudges across the static landscape of an ultrasound image—but he’s still not familiar with how they unfailingly and undoubtedly _always_ arrive at the wrong conclusions. 

The one that always catches him by surprise and makes him laugh the hardest is the notion that Atsumu is somehow less self-aware than his twin. Sure, he’s an athletic marvel—truly prodigious in the manner of spatial awareness, unbearably talented in the art of conducting an orchestra of titans—but the conventional wisdom on the matter is that Atsumu lives on the stage in the empty amphitheater made of one-way funhouse mirrors: that everyone in the crowd can see him performing the tear-jerker soliloquy, and that he can’t see anything other than his own warped reflection. It’s funny, Atsumu thinks, that anyone could believe that someone who's spent his entire life competing with his own reflection could somehow lack self-awareness. 

Case in point: Atsumu is self-aware enough to know that some of those baseless presumptions and unfounded assumptions aren’t entirely baseless; that many, for better or worse, actually wind up being true. For example: the conventional wisdom is that, between Atsumu and Osamu, Osamu is the more socially adept of the two—and this, Atsumu knows, is true. Only someone painfully self-aware would be capable of naming their worst quality without having to contemplate their answer: and Atsumu is more than aware that his greatest personality flaw is his propensity for conflict. 

Whether they were clad in diapers, or their matching kindergarten uniforms, or their high school tracksuits: Osamu was the one making friends while Atsumu was making enemies. It wasn’t even on purpose, really: it’s just that Atsumu found that light-hearted combative conversation generates less friction than his sorry attempts at congeniality ever yield. His mother, bless her heart, still tries to make excuses for him when she calls and asks if he’s busy ( _no, ma, I’m staying in tonight. Yes, just me.)_ , claiming that his over-competitive nature is merely the product of his near decade-and-a-half long commitment to his sport—but Atsumu knows better than to pin the blame on that. No matter what anyone else claims, Osamu is just as competitive as Atsumu: and yet, Osamu had never struggled with his ability to cultivate friendships the way Atsumu seemed to. And maybe, like love and cowardice and unfounded assumptions, this fault in the composition of Atsumu’s personality is just another thing that he’ll never outgrow—because even at the respectable age of 24, he still picks fights more readily than he picks friends. 

Yoshiyama Katsumi adds herself to the overgrown list of enemies and rivals when, in the middle of his approach to launch another serve over the net, Atsumu hears the rude, guttural sound of someone expectantly clearing their throat from somewhere near the entryway of the Toyooka Elementary School gymnasium. His feet leave the ground half of a heartbeat too soon: his palm connects with the ball in slow-motion; helplessly, he watches it rocket clear over the net and land _just_ outside of the white line at the back left corner of the court. Atsumu watches the volleyball bounce off of the back wall and pathetically dribble beneath the metal benches near the corner; he hears the faint and rhythmic tapping of sneakers against the linoleum. _Tap tap tap._

He feels the blood pulse around his left eye in a fierce twitch—another muscle memory his body can’t entirely forget. Making no effort to mask his agitation, he turns to meet the eyes of the rude newcomer, and standing in the doorway is a child (or maybe a teenager?—Atsumu can’t tell the difference between a newborn baby and a toddler, so really, it’s anyone’s guess). For someone so small, she certainly exudes a presence that connotes the existence of a spirit far too large for the vessel it occupies; Atsumu catches a glimpse of something in her, like the hazy afterimage-sunspots of Shouyou, of Kourai: small in stature, gargantuan in all else. The _tap tap tap_ of her foot continues as the two stubbornly maintain eye contact; Atsumu doesn’t know all of the rules to this game, but he’s relatively sure that if he looks away first, he’s the loser—and yeah, she’s almost certainly the handiwork of the same small gods that crafted Shouyou and Kourai. Unstoppable force, immovable object, whatever it is that they say. 

Another piece of conventional wisdom that many believe about Atsumu is that he’s petty; that he’s unwavering in his willingness to stoop as low as required: that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the battle; everything to score the point; anything to get the last mean-spirited, tittering laugh—and this presumption, too, is true. Atsumu doesn’t even try and obscure it: It’s evident from the joint-cracking back-arching limbo he contorts himself into, making those impossibly low tosses fly from his fingertips like a miracle, the static electricity still crackling around the ball as it slams against the opposite court. 

Wispy strands of the girl’s white-blonde hair occasionally escape from the confines of her ponytail, falling into her eyes when the aircon generates gusts intense enough to make the baby hairs dance nonsensically around her slightly rounded face. She does not uncross her arms to move the hair from her eyes; she does not blink. Atsumu does not blink, either. Most would presume that Osamu is the more patient twin—but this bit of conventional wisdom is false; Osamu is the most impatient bastard to grace this planet in the last millennium. Atsumu's no saint, either: however, he's patient when he needs to be. 

Without breaking eye contact, he stalks towards the bin of volleyballs and casually plucks a fresh one from the top. The girl’s slate-grey eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, her lips screwing into the beginnings of a petulant scowl; Atsumu returns to the backline with a smirk, and when he finally pulls his eyes away from her, he does so deliberately, because he does not intend to lose a staring contest with a child. He bounces the ball once; twice; three times: he feels silence settle over the gym as he inhales deeply—even the _tap tap tap_ of the girl’s sneaker has ceased—he arcs the ball high into the air; takes 4 massive strides; launches himself upwards—

The girl in the doorway lets out the loudest sneeze Atsumu has heard in his entire 24 years of existence, and he’s confident that no amount of ‘ _bless yous_ ’ could wash away the ungodly tenor that echoes through the vacant halls and wracks through the foundations of the near-empty building.

The concept of restraint is suddenly foreign to the palm of his hand: without meaning to, he smacks the ball as hard as he can, sends it zipping over the net at a speed that he thinks breaks the sound barrier. It slams into the back wall of the gymnasium with a thunderous clatter and falls to the ground. For a moment, the only noise is the dejected bounce of the ball against the floor—and then. The _tap tap tap_ of the child-size shoe returns with a vengeance _._

This silent exchange of childish barbs continues for another 15 minutes: Atsumu snags a ball, prepares to serve; the girl taps her foot, or yawns, or coughs; Atsumu’s fragile focus snaps in half, and he botches the serve; wash, rinse, and repeat. 

When the girl lets out a blood-curdling scream on Atsumu’s 19th attempt at an in-bounds serve, he finally snaps: “ _Jesus Christ_ , what the fu–hell is wrong with you?”

Her face scrunches into a grim expression, and Atsumu’s hit with a wave of vertigo because he feels like he’s looking into the fun-house mirror again. “You’re cutting into my practice time,” she tells him, as if he should just _know_ what he did to upset this random child. “I’d already been waiting for you to get off of the court for like, 20 minutes before you finally noticed I was standing there.”

“Ok, well,” Atsumu returns to the almost-empty cart of volleyballs, reaching towards the bottom to retrieve one of the few that remain: “I can’t get off of the court until I finish on an in-bounds serve, and I can’t get an in-bounds serve with you making so much noise. I need silence and serenity, which means that I need you to pipe down because if I don’t get at least one decent serve today, I will _literally_ lose my mind. Okay?”

He’s about to spin away from her for his (hopefully) final serve when she scoffs: “When is it ever ‘silent and serene’ during a volleyball game?”

“Uh, it’s silent when _I_ serve.” She raises a lone pale eyebrow, evidently not following the conversation: “I just tell the crowd to be quiet.” Her face grows even more confused; Atsumu’s face probably wears a similar expression. “Sorry, do you not know who I am?”

“Why the hell would I know who the creepy old guy in my school’s gym is?” She moves over to the metal bench and unzips her duffel bag, pulling out a pair of knee pads: “Also, what would you do if the crowd didn’t quiet down? It’s not like they have to listen to you.”

Atsumu, who had been preparing to squabble with a child for calling him a ‘creepy old guy,’ freezes—what _would_ he do if the crowd just continued yelling? It’s not exactly that he needs the silence: he just needs control of the pacing; he just needs to know that he’s the one setting the tone. He’s always had a loyal fan base who knew precisely how to behave during his serve: but with the Olympics not too far off in the future, he wonders (for admittedly the first time) if he’d actually crack beneath the pressure of not being the shot-caller. “Huh,” he says, eloquently.

_Tap tap tap._ Atsumu feels his eye twitch again; he looks back at the girl—and instead of the sneer she’d worn not so long ago, she now wears an expression that’s somewhat less guarded, more open: but still simmering with all of the lofty expectations of someone who’s just issued a double-dog-dare. She juts her chin outwards towards the court—simultaneously a demand and an invitation: “maybe you should figure out how, Old Guy.” _Tap tap tap._

And Miya Atsumu, in this universe, has many flaws; he’s loud, and blunt, and cursed with the intimate knowledge of his every fault and fracture—and he’s self-aware enough to know that he has a greater affinity for rivalries than he does for friendships; he wishes he could say his tendency for making enemies is limited to those who occupy his same age bracket (also known as adults), that finding a rival in a teenage girl is an unusual occurrence, a total anomaly: but given his mental age of twelve, he supposes it’s only natural to face his challengers on even footing.

_Tap tap tap._ His eyes flit between her tapping foot and her double-dog-dare smile. With a dramatic sigh, he extends a hand for her to shake: “Miya Atsumu.”

_Tap tap tap._ “Yoshiyama Katsumi.”

(The one other piece of conventional wisdom worth knowing: Atsumu’s friends are his rivals, and his rivals are his friends—he’s just not all that great at understanding that two things can be true simultaneously.)

* * *

**atsumu**

was it those videos of polar bears and the ice melting :(

those r rlly sad so i understand

also can u buy more kit kats while ur out

**kita**

?

**atsumu**

kit kats

i ate the last one :/

**kita**

I understand about the Kit Kats, but could you please clarify what you mean by ‘was it the polar bear videos’?

**atsumu**

polar bears. icecaps r melting

like is that the thing that made u care

**kita**

Hm.

No.

I mean, obviously, it’s something I care about, but it wasn’t my first motivator.

If that’s what you’re asking.

**atsumu**

ok

was it one of those oil spill thingies ?

**kita**

No.

Stop asking, you're not going to guess what it is. 

**atsumu**

ok ok fine

…

was it that little swedish girl ?

gretna ?

**kita**

I’m going to put these Kit Kats back on the shelf.

**atsumu**

WAIT

* * *

The night when Hana packs her bare essentials in a duffel bag, smearing snot and mascara across the side of his neck as she cages him in with a rib-crushing embrace, and leaves him—sobbing: _of course, I love you, I do, I do, but isn't it better for both of us if we call it off now?_ —is the first time in all 24 years of his life that Atsumu eats dinner by himself. 

The sky is still light when the door clicks shut behind her; he dazedly lowers himself into her usual spot on the couch, settles into the hollow indentation that's still laced with traces of her lavender perfume, and stares into the wall until the sky has drained itself of its sunset-reds and has now faded into the ashen blue-purple-black hues of a night sky jaundiced with light pollution—and his stomach doesn't growl a single time. When he finally does feel the hunger pangs radiating from his head to his toes, pulsating through bone marrow, rattling around the cavity of his skull, he finally checks the clock on his phone screen and finds that today has spilled over into tomorrow: which means that he has to play in the League championship game in a little over 36 hours: which means he has to practice: which means he has to eat. He chooses cereal because his eyes are too bleary to justify him operating over the open flame of a stovetop. He eats by himself because he doesn't want to let Osamu see him cry.

And as he eats in complete solitude, in total silence for the first time in his entire life, he realizes that he hates the sounds of chewing food; of swallowing it; of hearing it plunge into the freshly hollowed depth inside him. He's not sure if these are sounds he's heard before: the sickening click of his jaw as it unhinges, allowing his teeth to scrape against the spoon, lavishing his taste buds in its dull metallic luster; the gnash of his back teeth as they obliterate Crunch Berries; the swish of saliva as the mash of food snakes its way to the back of his tongue, slides down his throat; the burble of his stomach as the food settles itself into the acidic vacancy. He misses the jump-out-of-his-skin clatter of Hana's fork against her plate; he misses the hushed chatter between Keiji and Osamu, their pinky fingers not-so-secretly hooked around one another under the table, laughing together over ritualistic Saturday night dinners; he misses Sakusa's nauseous expression and pleading eyes, silently begging Atsumu to let him ditch, Shouyou and Bokuto talking with their mouths full over post-game hotpot—and in one of the most miserable moments of his entire life, he vows to himself that he will never eat in silence again.

Kita, as per usual, doesn't exactly feel the need to adhere to Atsumu's overdramatic vows; Kita, as per usual, has other plans. And like the tilt of the earth's axis allowing rice stalks to grow beneath the high-in-the-sky sun of summer, uprooted and harvested come autumn's seasonal shift: some things are predictable and cyclic—some things that happen unfailingly—some things like Atsumu, whom the laws of the universe dictate to be helpless against Kita's every whim; unable and unwilling to do anything other than fall into Kita's elliptical orbit: where Kita leads, Atsumu follows. Even to his own detriment:

In the past five minutes, Atsumu has taken two excruciatingly slow bites of the yakisoba on his plate. Kita, seated next to him on the living room floor, has not touched his food. Atsumu slows the grinding of his teeth even further, but the noise persists: the crunch of green pepper is almost louder than the crunch of his jaw joint, which is almost louder than the pounding of his heart. Kita's chopsticks sit in his bowl, untouched; Kita's chin sits in his right hand. His right elbow rests upon the surface of the uncovered kotatsu, the fingers of his left hand drumming an aimless rhythm along the fabric stretched across his right bicep. His eyes stay glued to Atsumu, unblinking. Atsumu takes a third bite of yakisoba, hellbent on deafening himself to the sounds of food becoming mush inside his mouth—chewing it so slowly and methodically that he actually doesn't chew it at all, and ultimately ends up swallowing it whole. Kita sighs through his nose, and Atsumu caves: "Are you not hungry, Kita-san?"

Kita hums noncommittally, and Atsumu's skin feels itchy beneath the threat of silence suffocating the room once more, the soles of his shoes burning his feet with the urge to flee—but Kita still has more to say: "Why are you still wearing a hat?"

Atsumu's hands, still locked in a vice grip around his chopsticks, race upwards to clamp around the aforementioned hat; he clutches at it like the wind's wily fingers plan to snag it from his head and send it flying: "What hat?"

"The one on your head. The one you've had on, nonstop, for like a week now." He squints and tilts his head to the side like he's solving an algebraic equation—like he's really _looking_ at him—and it makes Atsumu want to swallow his splintered wooden chopsticks in one merciful gulp. Kita's nose scrunches: "it makes you look like Osamu. Take it off."

Atsumu balks, scandalized—Osamu _wishes_ he could rock hat-hair as well as Atsumu can: "Okay, that was a low blow. Kita-san, you take that back right now."

"Sure; show me why you've been wearing that hat all week, and I'll be happy to tell you that you look nothing like your identical twin brother."

They stubbornly maintain eye contact for a few moments—immovable object, unstoppable force, whatever it is they say—but Kita is Kita, and Atsumu is Atsumu, and the entirety of the cosmos operates using a system of reasonably simple, practical rules: one of which is that Atsumu would willingly hand over the sacred secrets of the universe if Kita asked it of him. Atsumu sighs in concession, accepting his defeat as he pulls the hat from his head and reveals the stark contrast of his dark brown roots and his platinum blonde ends. "Hana used to do it for me. I've been putting it off—I've never been very good with touching up the roots." 

He waits—eyes downcast, his head drooping in shame—for Kita to snicker at the mess of dark roots, but the teasing never comes; obviously, the teasing never comes—Kita might not always be nice, but he is endlessly, endlessly kind. So instead, Atsumu receives the soft smile—the one that makes him feel stomach sick, like he's just chugged a gallon of ice water through a bendy straw—and a thoughtful hum: "First of all, as promised: you look absolutely nothing like your identical twin brother. Second, you know I would help you—why didn't you ask?"

(Of course, Atsumu knew that Kita would agree to help him without a moment of hesitation, which is precisely why he didn't ask.)

Atsumu merely shrugs, hoping that, for once, the slight shake of his shoulders might go undetected by Kita Shinsuke's omnipotent eyes, saying, "I'd hate for my high-maintenance hair care to make the bathroom stink like cheap bleach," as he hurries to shove the cap back onto his head. 

(The conventional wisdom is that, between Osamu and Atsumu, Atsumu is the selfish one.)

Today is Saturday, June 20th, which means it's the longest day of the year; which means it's the most interminable day, during the most interminable month—and Atsumu doesn't know if he'll make it to July, or if he even wants to—because the hand that catches his wrist before the hat can settle over the tiger-stripe bleach-burned strands feels a lot like a summer solstice, a warm cascade of light at the opening of some never-ending tunnel. His pulse hammers through the zigzag of warm-toned veins under the skin of his wrist with a magnitude that he thinks would break the Richter scale—and if Kita feels Atsumu's civilizations being leveled by the earthquake in his bloodstream, if he feels the destruction ravaging his veins, he doesn't mention it—"If you have the products, I can help you apply it. If you want." 

_If you want._ And the assumption is that Atsumu is the selfish one, and it's the assumption he wants to lay to rest with a spiteful eulogy more than any of the others: because Atsumu doesn't like that he's selfish, doesn't like that he exists in a positive feedback loop: always taking and taking, and never giving back. _If you want._ But Atsumu is nothing if not self-aware, and he knows that assumptions aren't free-floating, don't exist in isolation, spineless and lacking hind legs to stand upon; assumptions are, more often than not, rooted in something: like the seedlings Atsumu plants in fertile soil, under Kita's expert instruction, beneath the summer's heated gaze— _I_ _f you want._

(Atsumu can name very few things he wants more than Kita's fingers in his hair. Kita's fingers—paradoxically gentle and absolute, both decisive and erratic—painting precise strokes of bleach across the center-part divot of Atsumu's scalp like it's the ancient ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Atsumu, eyes closed, his back barely brushing against Kita's chest if he synchronizes his inhale to match Kita's exactly. Atsumu, filling the silence with any word, in any language, for the very purpose of masking the shotgun-shell kick-back of his heart against his rib cage.)

_I can help. If you want._ The hand splayed against the earthquake in his wrist loosens slightly, and Atsumu remembers learning that earthquakes can sometimes cause tsunamis: and he thinks the only thing he wants more than Kita's fingers in his hair is to drown, because Atsumu is selfish, and he wants, and he wants, and he wants. Kita's eyes are soft; kind; selfless—the fingers are a talisman on his pulse point, are mankind's crowning achievement in the art of stability: Atsumu doesn't feel even a hint of a tremor in the fingers branding their one-in-a-million fingerprints across his devastated skin—Kita is selfless: he offers his helping hands because he wants the world to withstand everything that comes when the tsunami crashes down. 

(If he had even an ounce of self-preservation skills, he'd smother his hair in box bleach in the bathroom all by himself; he'd lock the door and fry his hair in dollar store chemicals, because if Kita is stability personified, a double-reinforced steel-beamed concrete building, then Atsumu is the king of all things brittle—an incomplete Jenga tower, just one block away from the avalanche.)

(The conventional wisdom is that Atsumu is the selfish one, the one unafraid to dip his toes in the waters of self-indulgence, karmic justice be damned—and what is life if not a study in self-sabotage?)

He wants, and he wants—so, he takes; of course, he takes: "I'd like that, Kita-san."

* * *

While he's reluctant to admit that Osamu could actually teach him anything of value, Atsumu thinks that perhaps a lifetime of watching his twin brother act on impulse has impressed upon him a plethora of important life lessons, the most important of which is this: self-indulgence is but a hair's width away from self-sabotage. He digs his fingernails into the meat of his thigh, trying to staunch the apprehension that he refuses to call fear, and asks: "You do know how to do this, right?"

Golden-brown eyes meet his own in the mirror: "Do what?"

A half-stunned laugh leaves Atsumu's lungs just as Kita drapes a worn bath towel, a faded baby pink, sporting a fraying hole near its edge, around his shoulders. Miraculously, he doesn't flinch when Kita's thumbprint briefly brushes across the expanse of skin at his jugular, smoothing the towel into place—but Atsumu believes in karmic justice, and he's definitely due to run out of miracles pretty soon. "Um, bleach someone's hair?"

Behind him, the gentle clinking of a spoon against a bowl ceases. In the mirror, Kita's reflection sets the bowl of chemicals on a stool beside him, and he at least has the grace to look somewhat sheepish, saying, "Well, I've helped my sister dye her hair before—although, I guess that wasn't with bleach. But, I read the instructions that came along with the box kit, so it should be fine." The sheepish smile twists into something teasing: "Besides, the worst-case scenario here is that I irreparably damage your hair and you go bald." Atsumu's face turns sheet-white, and Kita squeezes his shoulder, his laugh like windchimes before a hurricane: "Don't look so frightened; I wouldn't have offered my help if I didn't think I could do it."

And this, Atsumu knows, is true: Kita Shinsuke can do anything and everything because he is unafraid of failure; he never missteps, never hesitates in the face of a challenge. But when Kita's hand settles at the bony base of his neck, his thumb finding the vertebrate at the tippy-top of his spine, steadying them both so that he can start to apply the paste to Atsumu's scalp: Atsumu thinks that he wouldn't mind any of it—the brittle, crispy strands of hair, fried from noxious elements; the promise of premature baldness; the possibility of chemical burns; the return of the dehydrated piss-blonde hair from his high school heydays—he'd be content with any potential outcome if it meant he got even an extra split-second of the hand, infinitely steady, at the junction of his spine and his skull. 

(How many times had he laid in his bed with his glossed-over eyes pinned to the ceiling, Osamu's dejected voice coming through the phone to tell him about another bad date, another regretful one night stand, another mistake, the message written in boldface in-between the lines: "I think I willingly chase after things, already knowing they have every intention of gutting me,"—how well had Atsumu understood, even then, that self-indulgence is nothing more than a code word for self-sabotage?)

It takes all of 15 minutes for Kita to apply the mixture to Atsumu's roots; they are the longest 15 minutes of Atsumu's entire existence:

His bony knees, bent awkwardly to accommodate the lack of space, dig into the brassy handles of the off-white wooden cabinets just below the sink; he sits in a backward-facing chair, his chest flush against its wicker back, his elbows leaned upon the marbled countertop on either side of the clean-smelling sink basin. The chair faces backward so that Kita can rest his knee upon the seat when he needs the extra leverage, and Atsumu's spine goes as rigid as the mountainous terrain of the countryside every time Kita's thigh brushes against the material of his shirt. If he could force his mouth to move, he thinks he'd speak in an attempt to mask the way his body tries its hardest to melt into the heat of Kita's hands because his hands are everywhere: against the lean-muscled plateau between Atsumu's shoulder blade and his spine; tickling the skin just above his ear as he cards through short strands of hair, applying the bleach to the hard-to-reach regions of his scalp; on the heated flesh between his throat and his shoulder: and how Kita doesn't notice the kick-drum cadence pounding through the pulse point in his neck is beyond him, because he should really be running out of miracles by now.

13 minutes into the endeavor, when Atsumu's entire head seems as though it's been lathered within an inch of its life, Kita's reflection squints and cocks his head to the side, murmuring: "Turn around, please."

Atsumu grips the chair back and twists, swinging his legs around to face Kita—and a feeling of gratefulness cascades through him, suddenly, for the fact that he only had a few bites of his food: he deduces that his stomach must have been a gold medal gymnast in a past life, based on the somersaults and back handsprings and whatever other dizzying maneuvers it's doing. It thrashes like a caught fish on the slick, wet deck of a fishing boat: gasping for a breath that's just out of reach, wondering how much longer it must endure before it finally suffocates. Those ambrosial, all-seeing eyes seek out Atsumu's mortal ones: searching for something, and then flitting away. The knee returns to the seat, grounding into the space between Atsumu's legs—and Atsumu wishes the fish would stop flailing around, stop grasping at straws and fighting for its life; wishes would close it's stupid, gaping maw and die already. 

Surgeon-steady fingers sink into Atsumu's brassy locks, pushing loose strands away from his forehead: and Kita is nothing if not precise as he methodically applies the bleach mixture to the wispy strands near the front of Atsumu's head. And no one knows better than Atsumu that he's selfish—because even then, he chances a request with the man upstairs, asks the gods above to hold off on karmic justice for just a few moments more—asks that they grant him just enough sanity to create a miracle, just enough to force him to close his eyes, look away from the star at the solar system's center and deny the powers of centripetal force. And somehow, as Kita's eyes bore into his forehead, he does not flinch; for once, he does not take more than he's given; where the soil begged for seeds of hope, Atsumu instead plants the poison of hopelessness because he thinks it'll hurt less in the long run. For the second time in his life, he swallows down what little courage he has, forces the love to die in the base of his stomach before it can crawl its way up his desert-dry throat: and he thinks he would have preferred the bleach burns to this empty feeling in his core.

("I think I willingly chase after things, already knowing they have every intention of gutting me," Osamu had said—and Atsumu, who steps into love instead of face-planting into it, who wears a layer of chainmail over his vulnerabilities, didn't quite grasp his meaning at the time. He gets it, now, he thinks, and prays that his feet sink their roots into the floor, deep enough to stop him ever chasing anything.)

"Done," Kita says, his voice soft and far-away. The hand in his hair finally loosens, and Kita steps away from the chair, his face slightly red from the heat overtaking the too-small room. Atsumu doesn't open his eyes until the heat of the star recedes enough for him to deny the existence of gravity.

And when he comes out of the bathroom 45 minutes later, his hair tinged with just a _little_ more lavender than usual (because he'd lathered his hair in purple toner and then proceeded to stare at the tile pattern of the shower wall for an extra 15 minutes as he tried to exorcise his mind of the lingering static from Kita's barely-there knee against a well of desire, untapped for the past half-decade), and Kita looks up from his book, with irises that must be familiar with the face of god, and smiles at Atsumu: he knows that maybe Osamu had understood it, back then: self-indulgence and self-sabotage are the same game with different names. 

The longest day of the year comes to an end. Atsumu thinks he craves hopelessness even more than he craves July. 

* * *

**ushiwaka**

Hello, Miya Atsumu. This is Ushijima Wakatoshi. 

Are you available to message with me for a moment?

**atsumu**

? yes

omg wait is omi-omi ok

**ushiwaka**

Yes, Kiyoomi is fine. 

He wants me to tell you something.

**atsumu**

sure but why can’t he tell me himself

**ushiwaka**

He says it’s because he doesn’t like you. 

Do not take it personally. I believe he is joking. 

Here is his message for you, verbatim:

“Tell that moron that his Spotify playlists are public. Just because he has stopped listening to Mitski radio doesn’t mean we can’t all see his mushy playlists.”

That is the end of his quote.

**atsumu**

FUCK

would u be willing to flip him off for me ?

**ushiwaka**

I will not do that. 

But I support your taste in music. Kiyoomi listens to Mitski, too, even if he refuses to admit it.

**atsumu**

god ushi i always knew u were my favorite

**ushiwaka**

:)

* * *

He's young when he learns that it's impossible to insist on launching bricks at anything and everything when you, too, live in a glass castle. His mother tries to explain this to him and Osamu when they're in first or second grade because the two of them only know how to communicate through harsh words and harsher hits, and she's not all that supportive of her sons always trading blows. Unfortunately for her, the metaphor flies right over their heads, the moral of the story doesn't quite stick the landing—and instead of stopping the barrage of barbed-wire words and litanies of slaps and punches that are _just_ on this side of purposefully hurtful, they simply learn to build their castles out of something a bit sturdier than glass. 

And it works, most of the time: Atsumu doesn't shed any tears over the accidentally overheard slanders uttered by teammates, doesn't feel the sting resulting from the poorly masked disdain of opponents—and because unkindness slides off of Atsumu's chainmail skin like melted butter in a heated skillet, he can still hurl bricks and sticks and stones at anyone and everyone without fear of retribution—he's made of denser stuff than those glassy crystalline structures, after all. Or, at least: that's what conventional wisdom has to say. 

Later sunsets mean earlier sunrises, which means there is an endless supply of hours filled with Kita's sunlit silhouette drawing Atsumu's attention from the monotonous motions of covering seeds in midnight-black soil or standing in the rice paddy's ankle-deep water, yanking weeds—and Atsumu is trying, and trying, and _trying_ to stomp out the tiny blossom bulbs of hopeful _what-ifs_ growing somewhere in his intestinal tract because sometimes, when he pulls his eyes away from his own despairing reflection in the paddy's pools to seek out the sun on Kita's creamsicle face, he catches him staring right back. 

June is the longest month of the year, or the decade, or the century: but it does eventually meet its end, and it happens something like this:

He's elbow deep in dirt already, even though the sun has only just begun to leak the first traces of its faint light over the sloping countryside when he feels Honda’s fingers against his elbow. Atsumu tilts his head upwards to see beneath his hat and catches Honda's eye, his eyebrow quirked in an unasked question. Honda places a finger to his lips, signaling Atsumu to shush before he even has a chance to speak; with his other hand, he directs Atsumu’s attention to his left. Atsumu follows the line of Honda's gaze a little further down the field and feels his breath catch against his throat: about 25 meters away, partially hidden by the tall grass, is a stork. 

The black of its tail reaches towards the sky as its long, needle-like beak tilts towards the shallow waters of the paddy in search of bugs; it stands on one long leg, the other bent in a way that maybe shouldn't be so graceful, but is. Somewhere in the back of his head, he remembers Kita telling him something about rice fields and storks and aquaculture and a bunch of other buzzwords that he couldn’t remember for the life of him: and Atsumu is abruptly struck by the fact that he's witnessing something for the very first time, that he's seeing something rare and beautiful and resilient beyond belief.

Behind him, he hears another awed gasp—and Atsumu stupidly turns away from the bird to look at the owner of that broken inhale, because his life is nothing if not a study in self-sabotage—because he, too, seeks out the scythe that will disembowel him with a perfectly serene smile: 

The sun breaks over the horizon and showers Kita's awestruck face in the starling shades of red-orange morning light; his eyes, which are normally heavy with something calculating and analytical, are lit up like those of a child. His often stoic face has shattered into a smile so bright that Atsumu really ought to look away for the sake of his own health and safety—but he doesn't because he's seeing something rare and beautiful and resilient beyond belief, and who would ever have the guts to force themselves to look away?

(So many parts of the lifetime-long lie that is Miya Atsumu are riddled with plot holes, so here’s an offering of a bright-spot of truth, something to provide a bit of clarity: he still lives in a glass castle from time to time, and it shatters most easily not from harsh words, but from kindness; from simple acts of beauty; from witnessing a love so strong, he's terrified of what it might be like to stand beneath all of that light.)

Some seconds pass, perhaps even a minute: and the stork flies away. Atsumu doesn't see it take flight when it finally does because his eyes are still stuck on Kita: and Kita's eyes still blaze with childlike wonder and something that looks a little bit like love when he finally looks back at Atsumu. "That was it," he says.

"Huh?" Atsumu asks, still rooted in something too terrifying to name.

Omnipotent eyes gaze up at the sky to watch the stork’s wings flap against the cotton-candy creamsicle sky, soaring away on a never-ending mission to bring its wonder to some other place: "The storks—that’s the thing that made me care. That was it for me."

(And the internet, this far out in the rural country, is unsurprisingly shitty—and Atsumu has a bit of free time on his hands, so he ends up spending a lot of that time parsing through Kita's collection of books because he's easily bored and even books about biodiversity have to be more enthralling than watching the wallpaper on the living room walls slowly, creepingly peel itself off. One of these books is about storks, and one of its chapters is on the symbolism of storks: which is how Atsumu learns that the stork is the universal motif for a new beginning; for a fresh start, for everything Atsumu yearns for, for everything he can never reach.)

Kita's eyes stay pinned to the heavens, the blazing orange sun drenching him in something interminable, in something too terrifying to name—and as he’s witnessing a love that he doesn’t know how to give and certainly could never find the ability to earn, he gulps down his courage, and buries his hands in the dirt once again, begging the roots of whatever occupies this bit of the earth to wrap around his wrist and drag him below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok SO: this chapter is a lil shorter than the last one because I originally wanted to include july in this chapter BUT there's a lot that happens in July (hint: someone's birthday perhaps???) and it just was not going to work out. also I took a break from writing this to binge jjk and write some itafushi so. bonk!
> 
> kudos and comments and constructive criticism r poggers. next chapter I'm going to try and have a ref doc included (I have like maps nd shit so. i;m including it whether u want it or not because I feel like id di so much research and I MUST share it)

**Author's Note:**

> ok so uh. this was not supposed to be a chaptered work, because I usually really struggle with writing anything other than a one-shot (because I am fickle and inconsistent). however. this first chapter is like 12k words and I am only a quarter through my initial outline and I will go Feral if I have to post this as one thing.
> 
> kudos and comments are ALWAYS appreciated. i read every single comment about one hundred times. thank u & farewell.


End file.
